This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Most people will never see coral in its natural habitat, so marine ecologist Sly Lee is bringing it to them.
In 2014, Lee, who works for the United States National Park Service, founded The Hydrous, a Hawaii-based non-profit that builds 3D models of corals. Its database includes those that are disappearing, such as elkhorn and staghorn corals, and it maps ecological changes in the ocean. "Once we've generated 3D models of entire reefs, we can investigate the habitat preferences of fish, coral-sponge interactions and other ecosystem processes," says Lee.
To build the models, Lee and team members Luke Walker and Yasmeen Smalley use handheld underwater cameras to photograph corals, generating about 250 photographs and up to 20 million polygon points per coral head. Plugged into Autodesk's 3D reality-capture software, the images
are assembled into high-resolution, interactive visuals.
So far, they've digitised coral from Hawaii, Palau, Guam and the Maldives, generating over 30,000 photos and 3TB of data. The models allow scientists to measure environmental impact by comparing images with the originals on the sea floor. "We can track changes resulting from disease, cyanide and dynamite fishing," Lee says.
For coral bleaching -- the loss of symbiotic living organisms through rising sea temperatures -- the 3D models illustrate how the damage alters growth.
Ultimately, Lee plans to build a comprehensive Wikipedia of 3D corals that anyone can populate and explore. "Humans don't make decisions based on data alone," he says. "This is so visual, so immersive, that you can actually have an underwater experience."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
