[Music]
[Volcano Rumbling]
[Water flowing/bubbles]
>>I've been curious about the natural world
since I was a very small child growing up
along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, where
I very quickly learned to study all the different
animals and pick up trash, which led me to
study marine science and oceanography in school.
And during my studies, I learned that the
ocean was in a great deal of trouble from
human impacts- from overfishing, from pollution,
as well as climate change, and I wanted to
do something about that, and for me, doing
something meant using science and technology
to find novel ways to keep track of what was
happening in the ocean, and look for solutions.
[Waves]
Coral reefs are valued at billions of dollars
across the world for fisheries, sustenance
fisheries in island nations...
>>...tourism, and
new compounds for the pharmaceutical industry
are two examples are how coral reefs have
contributed a lot of money and generated wealth
for a lot of people.
We have this tremendous wealth of different
types of ecosystems and species on this planet,
and having these reefs around to maintain
a sort of biological stock of genetic uniqueness
is really important for genetic diversity,
ecosystem health, and resilience of the ecosystem
in the face of things like climate change
and other sort of stressors they may encounter
in the future.
>>They've been called the canary in the coal
mine, they're one of the first marine ecosystems
to start to show very significant degradation
from ocean temperatures increasing and ocean
acidification.
And they're simply aren't enough people that
can be scuba diving in the water all the time
to tell you how the coral reefs are doing,
so we need new ways to monitor them using
things like satellite imagery that can easily
cover all parts of the world, even in places
that you can't very readily get a person to.
[Airplane taking off]
What the ER-2 is doing is telling us what
coral reefs would look like from space.
[Airplane taking off]
[Water flowing/bubbles]
>>I'm an environmental scientist.
I study ecosystems.
I study how those ecosystems are impacted
by external pressures such as climate and
population.
Our part in this project is to understand
the color of coral reef signatures coming
out of the water.
What colors will the HyspIRI sensor see?
Live corals look very different from dead,
algae-encrusted corals, and they look very
different from the surrounding un-colonized
sand and coral rubble.
So by looking at the detailed spectrum of
light coming out of the water in the visible and
near-infrared portion of the spectrum, we
believe we'll be able to say something about
where the coral resides and how healthy it
is.
In order to interpret the data that's being
collected by the ER-2, you have to know something
about the inherent reflectance of the features
on the ocean floor that we're interested in-
healthy coral, not healthy coral, bare sand,
and rubble.
So what we're doing is we're measuring, in
water,
the reflectance of the ocean floor,
very close to the ocean floor.
But also we're deploying radiometers at the
ocean surface, so that we can understand the
change in that color as it propagates through
water column to the surface.
That's the information that needs to be taken
into consideration when we try to interpret
the data in terms of coral health.
We have to essentially remove the effects
of water.
>>This is something relatively new, using satellite
imagery, using hyper-spectral imagery to categorize
coral reefs.
We're collecting bottom spectra underwater
of coral, algae, and sand, so that we can
better use the hyper-spectral imagery to figure
out how much coral or algae or sand there
are in each specific shot.
It's not immediately obvious in a satellite
image whether a pixel is coral or algae and
how much coral is in it.
And to do that really well, we need to collect
both pieces of information at the same time.
We need an airborne image, and we also need
to know exactly what's going on in the
water.
We can be collecting in water data to match
up with those specific images and so we know
that in a particular pixel there's a certain
amount of coral, a certain amount of algae,
it better informs us how, in the future, we
can remove the atmosphere and the water effects
from the satellite data.
[Background sound/chatter]
>>Our autonomous kayak system is a fully autonomous
platform that's customizable, configureable,
and made entirely with off-the-shelf components.
It'll be towing an optical sled from the US
Naval Research Laboratory, and we'll also
have it towing a YSI XO2 water quality parameter
monitoring sonde, which gives us the ability
to measure chlorophyll A, fluorescent dissolved
organic matter, pH, temperature, and salinity.
[Music]
>>These sensors are providing timely, and volume
of data necessary to understand not only coral
reef ecosystems, but all the other kinds of
ecosystems around the world, in the ocean
and on land.
And the only way we can save these ecosystems
is to understand how they respond and then
develop mitigation methods so that we can
help them out.
So that we can live with them.
[Music]
