Crowdsourcing has arrived on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Thousands of “citizen scientist” volunteers have spent the last 12 weeks participating in the Great Reef Census 2021. Volunteer teams of scientists, divers, tourists, and skippers have ventured to the far corners of the reef, from the tip of Cape York to the remote southern Swains. Last year, volunteers captured and uploaded over 13,000 images to the Great Reef Census platform. This year over 30,00 images have been submitted in the survey that ends tomorrow.
From the Great Reef Census website: Spanning 2,300km in length and comprising over 3,000 individual reefs, the Great Barrier Reef is one of the world’s most incredible natural icons, but only 5-10% is regularly surveyed. Given the immense size of the Reef, the impacts of disturbance events such as coral bleaching, extreme weather and poor water quality are often patchy, affecting some reefs more than others.
As the impacts of climate change become more advanced, scientists and managers need up-to-date information on individual reefs to better target their resources and protections. The Great Reef Census is trialing new ways of using citizen science to help understand how the system is changing year-on-year.
Thanks to Alaric Bond and David Rye for contributing to this post.
A nice day out – all we get is counting the species of birds in the garden 🙂