[Coral-List] Help Us Understand the Beauty of Coral Reefs

[Peter Sale]

Nicolas and listers,
I suspect I am missing something that will be obvious to most of you. But in what way will the development of predictive computer models able to estimate the aesthetic value of coral reefs serve to preserve or restore coral reefs?  Sometimes I think we get ourselves so deep down into the weeds, or in this case, the algorithms, that we forget what we are trying to accomplish. Also. I hope your survey will gather information on knowledge about coral reefs, because people who do not understand reefs often find them disappointingly brown and slimy when in fact they are vibrant living ecosystems of unrivaled complexity that can cause some of us to momentarily forget to breathe.

I'm not opposed to surveys or to predictive models. But I do wonder sometimes where coral reef research is going.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor (Emeritus)
www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/>