Reef Tracker

Reef Tracker| A New Perspective

A New Perspective

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protected areas and other forms of wilderness areas (e.g., arboretums, beaches, parks, marine monuments) have been closed worldwide. Your challenge is to lead the effort to examine any potential impacts of reduced human traffic in such local protected natural environments.

Summary

Reef Tracker is a Coral Reef Bleaching Prediction Model that aims to educate the public on the current rate of human impact on coral reefs. We compared various human impacts using satellite data to coral reef presence and health. we have recorded these following variables:Population, latitude, bleaching, severity, temperature, fish species and elevation zone by utilizing data visualization, we see a pattern emerge that is affecting coral bleaching.

How We Addressed This Challenge

This project addressed the A New Perspective challenge because the challenge asked for us to ask ourselves if a there will be achange in the behavior of land and marine life due to the reduced human traffic in these local natural protected areas. By projecting future numbers, we can also closely monitor what the limit our corals can handle. We found significant findings, for example:
1. Majority of coral bleaching is in Australia and Belize, two tourist hotspots

2. Urban populations along the Australian coastline seem to outrank the rural populations, Especially when the elevation is <=20m

3. Our most important finding led us to conclude that coral bleaching has significantly reduced since the beginning of Covid 19 pandemic. In our coral reef we saw no more red in some areas, which stands for a high case of coral bleaching.

This proves our hypothesis that human activity has a drastic effect on coral reef health.

you can learn more from our website at:

https://reeftracker.us/

How We Developed This Project

Coral reefs are the backbone to our society, so why do scientists estimate that by 2030, estimates predict more than 90% of the world’s reefs will be threatened by local human activities, warming, and acidification, with nearly 60% facing high, very high, or critical threat levels? The underlying issue can all stem from growing population and human activity. From overfishing, noise and chemical pollution to rising ocean temperatures, humans play a major role in why our reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate. This is because of either diseases that affect the corals or coral bleaching.

This year especially has hit us hard as a community, and as we see headlines that wildlife are increasingly appearing in urban areas, we wondered if the same could go for the living forests of the oceans. Coral reefs are actually animals, not plants, and if other once endangered animals were appearing once again, we wondered if the bleaching phenomena in Coral reefs has had any change since the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic. We used space agency data in our project to see changes in variables pre and post the COVID19 lockdown. We looked specifically at the countries of Australia and Belize because of the way they handled the pandemic and the fact they are both home to the two largest great barriers in the world. In addition, we looked at Key West data to look at tourism statistics and how that has affected the artificial coral reef growth. After converting the documents to excel files, we focused on scrapping the data we found. Then we also had a teammate program the algorithm using Python to compare the ocean temperatures to Coral Reef bleaching. In conclusion we were really thankful to NASA for having data to work with to prove our hypothesis that human activity was affecting coral reefs. We were proud to see this because this inspires us to make change in our own coastal communities to demand change and protection for our precious reefs.