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Posit Presents: Saving the Coral Reefs

Data scientists are changing the world. For a real-world view of how data scientists work to solve hard, complex, and valuable problems, watch Pim Bongaerts from the California Academy of Sciences speak about using data science to help save coral reefs. About Pim: Pim Bongaerts is the McCosker Chair of Aquatic Biology, Assistant Curator at the California Academy of Sciences, where he applies genomics and field ecology to his research into coral reef biodiversity and evolution

Mar 11, 2021
2 min
RStudio Data Science Machine Learning Python Stats Tidyverse Data Visualization Data Viz Ggplot Technology Coding Connect Shiny Rmarkdown CRAN Interoperability Dplyr Forcats Ggplot2 Tibble Readr Stringr Tidyr Purrr Github Data Wrangling Tidy Data Odbc Rayshader Plumber Blogdown Gt Lazy Evaluation Tidymodels Statistics Debugging Programming Education Rstats Open Source Oss Reticulate Pim Bongaerts California Academy of Sciences Coral Reefs Ocean Conservation

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Transcript#

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Going diving for the first time was an incredible experience. All of a sudden, colors are very different, sound seems to come from all directions. On a coral reef, life is everywhere. It's just everywhere. And from that point forward, I knew that I really wanted to specialize on these deeper reef communities.

In 2016, we actually saw a major event that affected coral reefs around the world. It's estimated that we lost about half of the coral on the Northern Great Barrier Reef. Actually witnessing that bleaching firsthand was a major turning point in my career. From that point onward, I started to feel a real responsibility to start studying these reefs in a way that could more actively contribute to their survival.

From that point onward, I started to feel a real responsibility to start studying these reefs in a way that could more actively contribute to their survival.

Data science on the reef

So my group at the California Academy of Sciences uses imaging and genomic methods to study the ecology of coral reefs. Things have changed for us as coral reef biologists a lot in the past couple of decades. With genomics and imaging technologies, it's no longer a field science. Now, it's very much a data science.

The data that we collect from the field, we need programming languages like R and Python to analyze our results. With these kind of analysis, we can actually identify the genotypes within a population that hold most promise for survival. At the same time, we can also see whether there's enough of those individuals to really be viable into the future.

Why coral reefs matter

Coral reefs are incredibly important. There's no doubt about that. They host 25% of marine species. They provide food and livelihoods to 500 billion people. They contribute billions to our global economy. There's no doubt that coral reefs are important. With these new technologies, I do have hope that we can preserve coral reefs for future generations.