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

Fri May 26 08:28:20 UTC 2023

Dear Phillip, Andreas, Peter, and coral fellows,

I am glad this post triggered such interesting discussions. I want to make it clear that by evaluating the aesthetic of biodiversity (coral reefs, and any other taxa) our aim is not to say, let’s conserve what is beautiful or to use beauty to make people concerned about biodiversity. Actually it is the inverse, our point it to measure the decoupling between human perception of biodiversity and the reality of ecosystem health and functioning. Sometimes they match, sometimes not and we have then to communicate on this with data in hand. For instance concerning reef fishes, we found that the most functionally original species (and thus important to ecosystem functioning) were the less beautiful (http://nicolasmouquet.free.fr/publications/Langlois_et_al_2022_Plos_Biology.pdf). All this brings us to how we measure human perception of nature, how much this perception is disconnected to the reality of ecosystem functioning and how could we correct for these biases to make the public more aware of reality and even make them love more what they initially found not beautiful. We are discussing this potential positive loop between understanding and aesthetic here : http://nicolasmouquet.free.fr/pdf/Tribot_el_al_2018_PRSLB.htm

By the way, we have a bias toward French speaking respondents on our online survey (47% of the 1500 respondents so far are French). Could you help me balancing this toward other countries ? Simply by sending this survey within your networks.

Link to the survey again : https://www.biodiful.org/#/beautifulcorals

And here is a text you could use. Thanks so much for helping !

—————
Subject : Help Us Understand the Beauty of Coral Reefs - Participate in our Survey!

Dear all,
We need your valuable input to advance our research on the aesthetic value of tropical coral reefs! As a part of the Marine Science Department of the IPB University, the Lancaster Environment Centre, the MARBEC laboratory, and the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia, we are conducting a survey to analyze human perspectives on the beauty of coral reefs.

By participating in this survey, you will play a vital role in the development of predictive computer models that can estimate the aesthetic value of different coral reefs. Your contribution will directly contribute to our ongoing research efforts. Estimated completion time is approximately 5 minutes.

Your participation is greatly appreciated, and together, we can make a significant impact on coral reef preservation and conservation. Please click the link below to start the survey:

https://www.biodiful.org/#/beautifulcorals

Thank you also for sharing this survey within your network (professional and personal). Actually we are really counting on you to trigger a snow ball effect and get out of our community (academia and divers). You can also retweet & like on twitter here : https://twitter.com/NicolasMouquet/status/1658020475107266563?s=20

Thank you for your time and support. Let's work together to celebrate the beauty of coral reefs!

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

—————

Le 26 mai 2023 à 04:33, Phillip Dustan <phil.dustan at gmail.com> a écrit :

 I Agree. I was a co-author on this paper. My photo time-series of Carysfort Reef were used to help validate the algorithm.
https://biospherefoundation.org/project/coral-reef-change/

However, there is a greater logical flaw in your thinking. For years the mantra has been "People only protect what they love"
Cousteau popularized the idea and he always believed that it worked but I think it is fair to say that the current state of affairs is that either people do not love reefs or the idea is false.
Everyone treats coral reefs as a resource that provides goods and services to humans when in fact reefs need all their productivity to maintain themselves.
Reefs are living processes and that is what makes them beautiful to humans, a healthy reef glows with life.
This can be quantified with image processing but that does not seem to add to their conservation unfortunately.
Guess they need more than the perception of love to be allowed to exist in the Anthropocene..........
Phil

On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 7:59 AM Andreas Haas via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>> wrote:
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<mailto: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<mailto: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/><http://www.petersalebooks.com/>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Coral-List mailing list
> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
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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
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--

Phillip Dustan PhD
Charleston SC  29424
843-953-8086 office
843-224-3321 (mobile)

"When we try to pick out anything by itself
we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords
that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe. "
                                         John Muir 1869

A Swim Through TIme on Carysfort Reef
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCPJE7UE6sA
Raja Ampat Sustainability Project video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RR2SazW_VY&fbclid=IwAR09oZkEk8wQkK6LN3XzVGPgAWSujACyUfe2Ist__nYxRRSkDE_jAYqkJ7A
Bali Coral Bleaching 2016 video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxOfLTnPSUo
TEDx Charleston on saving coral reefs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwENBNrfKj4
Google Scholar Citations:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HCwfXZ0AAAAJ