Seaview Survey Project

Why we need reef data

• Coral reefs are in conservation crisis due to the effects of climate change, unsustainable fishing and tourism practices, poor land use, pollution, and invasive species. 70-90% of reefs globally may be lost by 2099.
• Reefs are difficult to monitor. They are often inaccessible and remote, and are not readily observable using satellite technologies.

Having a measure of their abundance and ‘health’ is essential for understanding how reefs are changing and for informing conservation action.

The project

The Seaview Survey project conducted 860 detailed scientific surveys of shallow reefs (10 metre depth) in the Atlantic (mainly Caribbean), the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, and South-East Asia.

Using innovative technology including custom 360^o underwater cameras and machine learning algorithms, the Seaview Survey project was able to collect and classify over one million georeferenced coral reef images along transects (sections at regular intervals) with an average length of approximately two kilometres.

Project outputs

The University of Queensland has made the datasets open access in UQ eSpace. This includes:

1. Over one million standardised images (quadrats covering approximately 1m² of sea bed)
2. Human-classified annotations that can be used to train and validate image classifiers
3. Benthic (underwater) cover data derived from the photo-quadrats
4. Raw images (covering 360°) from which the photo-quadrats were derived.

Many research publications, available in UQ eSpace, have utilitised this dataset. The dataset will support further research in coral reefs conservation, the impact of climate change, and the sustainability of marine environments.

Details on the survey locations and links to the data files for download are found in the map below.