Scientists in Australia have mapped more than 1,000 previously unchartered coral reefs in northern Australia. And the lead scientist was inspired by satellite technology, such as Google Earth, more than a decade ago.
When Google Earth started being widely used, many people used it to get a bird’s-eye view of their home or local neighbourhood. But Eric Lawrey wanted to see something else from the skies.
Lawrey, who is project manager at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS)’s eAtlas, wasn’t fussed about spying on his own home from above. He was using the technology to peek at the coastline of northern Australia. How much of these waters had coral reefs that weren’t on any maps and why were they missing?
But, even when it was clear, he couldn’t detect where the corals might be. "If you look at any one satellite image, the water just looks like turquoise paint and you can’t really see reefs," says Lawrey in a statement. This is partly because the reefs were often obscured by murky waters.
But Lawrey had an idea. "If we overlay 200 images of the area, taken at different times, to create a composite image, all the swirly patterns of the moving water move around and average out while the reefs are constant," he says. "Their signal gets reinforced and they become much clearer. It allows us to peek deeper into the water column than we could in one image."
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So, that’s exactly what Lawrey and his fellow researchers did. They uncovered over 1,000 previously unmapped reefs, from Houtman Abrolhos in Western Australia to western Cape York in Queensland. Although many of the reefs were smaller than those found in the Great Barrier Reef, Lawrey believes northern Australia has around the same quantity.
“I'm sure people that are there, or locals, know about all these places,” he says, but most of these reefs hadn’t been properly surveyed and so were largely overlooked by marine management and conservation efforts.
We’re not just talking about a few corals. Lawrey and the team say they have created the first comprehensive view of northern Australia’s coral reef boundaries, with more than 2,900 rocky reefs and 3,600 coral reefs mapped and classified.
“The number of reefs we found inshore was a surprise,” he says. “It became a bit of a problem for our project because we had to map so many of them.”
Now we know they’re here, putting these habitats on the map is an important step in ensuring they are protected.
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