coral reef restoration projects and studies are becoming more commonplace with the advancements of modern technology and the pressing need mankind has now developed to find ways to utilise these methods to aid in the revitalisation or conservation of the environment and it’s inhabitants. These types of projects often share the common features of Citizen Science; a form of open-scientific practice that allows for anyone to participate within a project simply by taking photos of the environment around them; documenting changes in nature or adapting their smartphone sensors by downloading an app to help scientists monitor water and air quality. Citizen Science projects are often fun and can even take the form of a simple game whereby playing participants help inform health and medical research projects.
A Citizen Science project can often range in the amount of involvement needed from one person to hundreds of people collaborating together towards a shared goal. Typically the publics involvement is in data collection, analysis, or reporting. However there is still a brief that the public must work with as participants must all use the same protocol so that the data can be combined together and be considered a high quality. From the collaborative work of this wider community, scientists and volunteers can come together to share their collected data with the greater public to raise awareness to a problem and enable for it to be used in helping aid scientists to come up with real solutions or conclusion to a project or problem they face.
Zooniverse one of the largest providers for citizen science projects globally for people-powered research. This platform was designed to enable members of the public from around the world to come together to assist professional researchers and scientists with their work. As the biggest challenge most researchers face currently is dealing with overwhelming amounts of data that comes from the advancement of modern technology zooniverse, providing a forum to help alleviate this problem by giving willing participants access to aid in the collection and mining process to help accelerate the work being conducted by professionals, so that they may reach their goal in a quicker time frame and more effectively this collaboration and use of citizen science methods has resulted in new discoveries and produced data of greater use for the wider research community.
Zooniverse projects range into many different fields from the Arts to Climate changes, all being constructed to function at a level where participants are able to take part in research that can effect real change by converting volunteers' efforts into measurable results. These projects have produced a large number of published research papers on a matter of many different subjects e.g. Space, Medicine and Climate Change. With platforms such as these in place citizen science projects are able to achieve their goals much more effectively and help educate and engage members of the public in areas of science they may have never considered to be able to contribute towards or access to effect real change.
The direct benefits of using citizen science for reef restoration can only be enhanced when professionals practitioners utilised the word of mouth or wide-spreading capabilities of the public as a way to pass on their newly acquired knowledge. As well as the importance of the researchers work as a way to implement some of the simple changes a community or someone might make to their current life style or living conditions, such as considering your waste output, the types of products you consume and the way you interact with ocean life. Distilling these principles into the greater public is something all citizen science projects are capable of.
Rescue A Reef is a project first conducted by the Lirman Lab Group in 2015 and has been engaging in coral propagation and restoration on the costal shores of the Caribbean and Florida over the past decade. The primary focus of their work is to advance the growth of threatened coral species such as Staghorn and Elkhorn to data they are responsible for out plantations of “25,000 corals in Florida and the Caribbean, recovering denuded coral populations and restoring the ecological services lost to reef degradation.”(Miami, 2020).
Through the work of their citizen science programs they have been able to advance the research being conducted at an academic level whilst actively engaging the public in a coral gardening framework as participants aid with the collection corals from their underwater coral nurseries that then get transplanted onto degraded reefs, aiding in species and habitat recovery. The results of their work has lead to multiple publications on how others may develop more cost effective methods with less invasive technology intervention required.
Coralive.orgisa Swiss-based environmental organization that is currently operating a coral reef restoration project in North Male Atoll, Maldives, their aim is to effect change worldwide to help protect and restore coastal ecosystems. Their work involves restoring coral reef and coastal ecosystems, they also manage marine protected areas however their primary objective is creating community based educational programs that informs the public of their efforts and its importance it holds globally to motivate the public to become involved and find a way to contribute themselves.
The project they curated in 2018 in the North Male Atoll, Maldives was responsible for the first ever 8,000 fragmented coral nursery composited out of mineral accretion methods that causes a low voltage direct current of electricity to form new solid limestone rock structures in the sea to aid in growth of corals with the use of this approach the team at coral.org were able to establish a coral nursery with an increased growth rate, and a stronger resilience to conditions like bleaching and ocean acidification common side effects happening across the world’s seas due to climate change. From the work they had conducted in 2018 they were able to progress their project further as in 2019 they repurposed their 8,000 coral samples to become the building blocks of a three-hectares restoration project composed of 250 structures to be transplanted along the coastline, with the combined efforts of a partner company Coral-AID they were able to devise a new technologically set-up for the mineral accretion that provided 25 amperes of current from a land-based power source that uses the equivalent amount of energy as a 100-Watt light bulb.