I think that the most important thing
for everybody to realize is the coral
reef is important to every single person
watching this news release. Everybody is
affected by it here in Hawaiʻi because
the reef is intimately linked to our
health and our economy. The thing that we
need to really stress is if you see
bleached corals don't step on them. If
you see somebody allowing runoff to come
into the waters and there's muddy water
going over the reef, ask them to stop
doing it or report it if it's a
developer. Do everything you can to keep
the environment around the reefs that
you see as clean as possible and as
untouched as possible. We are trying to
breed corals or develop coral stocks
that we can use to either restore
damaged reefs or to build resilience in
reefs that are facing climate change.
So this NASA project it's an enormous scale
looking at reefs across large spaces and
from a distance. But it requires detailed
ground truthing on the ground and what
the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology
does so well is provide the capacity on
the ground to support this project.
From marine mammal research and how they hear,
to sharks and how they move around our
islands, to understanding how the corals
themselves function in warmer and more
acidic waters that are related to
changes in the environment with climate change.
