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

[Andreas Haas]

Hi everyone,
I kinda wrote such a paper a while ago dealing exactel with this topic (Can
we measure beauty? Computational evaluation of coral reef aesthetics
<https://peerj.com/articles/1390/> , https://peerj.com/articles/1390/)...
We had a really hard time finding an outlet or reviewers because no one
could really understand the idea behind it, but maybe this group might
appreciate it.
Cheers,

Andy



On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 3:20 PM MOUQUET Nicolas via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

> 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/>
>
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-- 
Dr. Andreas F. Haas
Department of Marine Microbiology and Biogeochemistry
NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research
Department of Biology
San Diego State University, USA