[Coral-List] Aesthetics of coral reefs

[Forest Rohwer]

Dear Coral Listers,

We have a semi-weird paper that some of you might enjoy. Basically, we used
features extracted from photos to construct an aesthetic score for coral
reefs. Pristine reefs are more aesthetic pleasing than are degraded reefs
(correlations with microbialization and NCEAS impact scores). Further, old
photos of the same site are more aesthetically pleasing then are modern
photos (at least of the dataset we used; generously donated by Dr. Phil
Dustan).

You can find the manuscript here https://peerj.com/articles/1390/

If you want to try a few photos of your favorite coral reefs, go here <
sensiphi.com>. This is still in the beta mode, but has been working well so
far (knock on wood).

Sincerely,
Forest Rohwer