Seatrees has teamed up with Samsung and scientists to help drive forward coral restoration efforts.
The collaboration brings together the three partners to help support and develop new technologies aimed at improving and scaling coral restoration projects around the world.
One aspect was the development of an app used on Samsung Galaxy devices to help with the large-scale evaluation of underwater imaging. The collaboration has worked on coral restoration projects in Florida, Fiji and Indonesia.
Commenting on the collaboration, Seatrees Co-Founder and Director Michael Stewart stated:
“At Seatrees, we’re committed to scaling coral reef restoration in partnership with local communities. This collaboration with Samsung and researchers from University of California San Diego presents an exciting opportunity to enhance the work of our restoration partners by revolutionizing how we track, measure, and showcase the impact of these efforts.
“The widespread availability of mobile phones worldwide, and their ease of use underwater make them a powerful tool for capturing coral reef imagery, playing a vital role in community-led restoration efforts globally.”
While Plant A Million Corals President, CEO and Founder Dr. David Vaughan added:
“Coral restoration is fairly new and the technologies for photogrammetry were always out of reach of the coral practitioners and previously only available to universities and government agencies. Also, it took months to get them scheduled and months to get the results. Now smartphones like the Galaxy can have the groundbreaking advancements of making this technology affordable and fast and with simple tools and expertise at the user level.
“We hope to expand the use of photogrammetry from occasional usage to regular monitoring of corals planted each month and for long term monitoring into the future. We also hope to be the first to show the expanded usage in our land-based nursery where we can track and monitor our numerous tanks and thousands of corals without diving but using our waterproof covers in and above the tanks. Finally, a way to track and store important data in photos of multiple corals over time and even time sequenced growth documentation and measurements.”
