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

Fri May 26 02:33:32 UTC 2023

 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> 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> 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/>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Coral-List mailing list
> > Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> > https://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/mailman/listinfo/coral-list
>
>
>
> --
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Coral-List mailing list
> Coral-List at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
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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
<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