Coral Reef Ecosystem

One of my research was on using time series analysis to detect anomalies in corals. This is part of the Allen Coral Atlas project which is led by our GDCS and partnered with the National Geographic Society, Planet, the University of Queensland, and Vulcan Inc. The current study sites are located in the Hawaiian islands, where we have received increasing bleaching reports on the hawaiicoral.org website, which is a community report website launched by our center for coral bleaching monitoring. The necessity of this project is that, coral bleaching, along with marine ecosystems changing, are spreading into a global problem. We started from the Hawaiian islands and will extend the area to global coverage.

To monitor the coral reefs, I use statistics to detect the anomalies in the corals from satellite imagery. I include more time frames into the model as we collect more data sets from Planet satellite products, and apply advanced time-series analysis, including autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and Prophet into the model pipelines. I also apply scikit-learn machine learning package and integrate unsupervised learning into the time-series analysis. Through this pioneering project, I expect to discover the fundamental understanding of changes in the coral reefs, which will lead to high impact journal publications, and may lead to changes in the policy in Hawaii.

Useful Sites

• Allen Coral Atlas

• NOAA Coral Reef Watch