Why do people care about coral reefs? Why does their damage cause such concern and outrage? What drives people to go to great lengths to protect and restore them?
Why do people care about coral reefs? Why does their damage cause such concern and outrage? What drives people to go to great lengths to protect and restore them?
Of course, it’s partly because of their ecological importance and economic value—but it’s also because they are beautiful. Healthy coral reefs are among the most visually spectacular ecosystems on the planet—and this beauty is far from superficial. It underpins cultural heritage value, supports tourism industries, encourages ocean stewardship and deepens people’s emotional connections to the sea.
But how can such beauty be measured? And when it is destroyed, can it be rebuilt?
Traditionally, many coral reef monitoring and restoration programs overlook their beauty, considering it too subjective to measure. And as a team of scientists, that frustrated us. We knew that to most effectively draw on this key motivator for coral conservation, we had to be able to measure beauty.
In some ways, it’s an impossible task. But our new study published in Scientific Reports grapples with this challenge, delivering a way of quantifying the aesthetic value of a coral reef, as well as measuring its recovery when previously damaged reefs are restored.
Our international team of marine scientists has been working at the Mars coral restoration program (the largest project of its kind) in central Indonesia. Here, local communities and international businesses have collaborated for over a decade, rebuilding reefs that were once decimated by dynamite fishing.
