Now, this time-consuming work is performed with the help of AI-assisted tools that can extract these data from imagery, significantly speeding up the process by which the team can observe how these corals are growing, shrinking, changing, dying and recruiting.
Key to this effort is layering her findings with other relevant data: namely, from the large-area imagery collection and processing that researchers in the Sandin Lab have been conducting for years. Their work initially involved manually tracing corals from underwater images collected during site surveys and interpreting those images to identify coral species. But with nearly a million corals across 100 islands, that is an enormous amount of data to process. Now, this time-consuming work is performed with the help of AI-assisted tools that can extract these data from imagery, significantly speeding up the process by which the team can observe how these corals are growing, shrinking, changing, dying and recruiting.