Reef Support

Reef.io is an online monitoring and predictive maintenance tool that uses AI and satellite imaging for coastal reef health, beach and aquaculture pollution prevention. Our approach and backend development produces different types of data which together can be used to build a picture of reef ecology across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, that is comprehensible and rapidly accessible to small business owners. The mission of Reef.io is to capture commitments and practical actions, and to bring together the key players needed for this. We believe monitoring technology only goes so far without the adoption of practical steps, the solutions thus lie in the strength of the blue community

The challenge

Despite occupying less than 1% of the ocean’s surface, coral reefs support around a quarter of known marine species, including more than 4000 species of fish and 7000 species of coral, with an estimated worth of US$9.9 trillion to the human economy. To illustrate the gap addressed, a senior professor of coastal management at Wageningen told us 'coral bleaching is impossible to detect from space'. A year later in 2017, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission launched and a year later the first imagery of coastal bleaching was produced. The challenge for beaches is the loss of income through degraded ecotourism and for fisheries the loss of income through poor harvest. Current monitoring programs have several caveats that restrict its commercial use. 1. Cost-related: detailed, continuous monitoring of coral reefs by field survey is expensive and substantial reef areas are located in developing countries with limited resources 2. Scale-related: reefs are highly heterogeneous systems and even with sufficient resources monitoring programs provide scattered information in time and space. 3. Time-related: remote monitoring systems and programs can take months to implement

The solution

The Reef.io solution is an automatic warning system that detects 3 key things: 1. Coral Bleaching 2. Algae bloom and sediment plumes 3. Marine debris (plastics, ship waste) The platform and dedicated AI server uses these warning to provides guidelines for: 1. Beach managers : crowd and pollution control, debris management and coral restoration 2. Aquaculture farmers : harvest period planning, management of resources, quick intervention of debris barriers