Sustainability Report: High-Tech Coral Reef Monitoring

Warming water has led to the collapse of coral reef systems in the western Indian Ocean, essential to fisheries, protecting shorelines, and reducing beach erosion and sea-level rise. Marine scientists from Nature Seychelles, as part of an international project to protect and restore the reefs, are promoting varieties of coral that they have found to be resistant to the rise in temperature.

Often it is faster and easier to harvest molecules for medical purposes from nature than to make them in a laboratory. A scientist is looking for cancer-fighting molecules in coral and sponges in the tropical Pacific.

Beyond its common application as a predictor of consumer purchasing behavior, AI can be utilized to tackle poverty issues, improve agricultural efficiency, and increase access to information for otherwise disconnected populations. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are putting global satellite photographs into a complex algorithm to gauge economic activity.

Prosthetics for most are frequently challenging, both in terms of mobility and associated pain. This video highlights a doctor in Sweden innovating new, more reactive prosthetics, aimed at addressing these challenges.

Climate change is a mounting threat to coral reefs, which serve not just as critical habitats for ocean life and a draw for the tourism industry, but also as a buffer to the increasing storms caused by changing weather patterns. In the first scheme of its kind, private businesses, nonprofits, and the government in Mexico's Yucatán Penninsula are combining financial resources to take out an insurance policy on their coral reefs. The insurance will help rebuild the reefs after storms and man-made damage, and fund new ways to keep them healthy.

Villages along the Irrawaddy River delta in Myanmar have spent years replanting mangroves in at attempt to restore their ecosystem and guard against the negative effects of climate change, but it is a labor intensive and time-consuming process. Now, with the help of specially-designed tree planting drones from startup BioCarbon Engineering, as many as 10,000 trees can be planted in a single day, using technology that not only distributes seeds in special pods, but is able to calculate optimal soil conditions, locations, and species of tree most likely to survive in any given area.

Climate change is destroying coral reefs at a startling rate - threatening the livelihoods of millions of people, increasing the damage caused by storm surges, and affecting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Scientists are now exploring revolutionary - and sometimes controversial - methods to learn more about and preserve coral reefs, including selective breeding of those species proven to survive conditions such as high toxicity and heat, and cultivating the regrowth of colonies one centimeter at a time.

Airplanes and birds don't mix - thousands of birds are tragically killed around airports each year, and collisions (or "ingestions," as the industry calls them) of birds and jet engines can be extremely dangerous to flights. Finding an effective way to keep birds away has proven tricky, as birds are clever and quickly acclimate to many traditional methods, so the Edmonton airport in Alberta is "piloting" an exciting new technology: a robotic falcon that moves like a real predator, and seems to have had success in trial flights.

For all the positive tools and platforms the internet has helped create over the decades, it can also be an extremely dark place, and has unfortunately enabled the horrific and wide-spread sharing of millions of images depicting child abuse, including of rape and torture. Artificial Intelligence - specifically the Arachnid web crawler launched by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection - is proving the most efficient and effective weapon in shutting down these abominable sites, combing through scores of data at a speed no human or government can match, and issuing takedown notices.

Could kids be part of the solution in the fight to save coral reefs? These researchers in Belize think so. The Community Researcher Training Program, managed by James Foley and the Toledo Institute for Development and Environment (TIDE), is an environmental institute in Belize that invites students from local communities to conduct research that may have a direct impact on saving these reefs.