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

[MOUQUET Nicolas]

Hi Peter, thanks for your answer. Evaluating the human perception of sescape is of strong interest in our willing to measure the non material contribution of nature to people. Aesthetic is among the most direct perception we have but one of the most difficult to measure. It requires using questionnaires such as the one I sent you but is always limited as it take time to evaluate few images. By using this online survey and then building a deep learning model to predict human aesthetic perception, we will be able to compute aesthetic for thousands of images collected in the field (look at what we did for coral fishes here as an exemple of our research : http://nicolasmouquet.free.fr/pdf/Langlois_et_al_2022_Plos_Biology.htm)

And you are right it will then be a matter of combining this measure of human perception with ecological attributes of the coral communities to understand the level of decoupling between aesthetic perception and ecological functioning (we did it with coralligenous communities already here : http://nicolasmouquet.free.fr/pdf/Langlois_et_al_2021_Ecol_Indic.htm ).

Altogether, this will allow us to increase the public awareness of the decoupling between what people find beautiful and ecologically functioning and help (hopefully) triggering a positive loop between understanding and perception. This might seems evident to you and unfortunately not to most of the public.

Your help filling and sharing this survey will be very valuable : https://www.biodiful.org/#/beautifulcorals

Thank you,

Nicolas Mouquet, CNRS, MARBEC, University of Montpellier.
https://twitter.com/NicolasMouquet
http://nicolasmouquet.free.fr/





Le 20 mai 2023 à 23:16, Peter Sale <sale at uwindsor.ca> a écrit :

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/>