AI-Powered Conservation: The Future of Coral Reef Protection with Andy Ridley

1:00:03 10 years ago, the Great Barrier Reef, the largest barrier reef in the world, one of the eight wonders of the world bleached, like 93% of it bleached. And then the year after it bleached again. And then it's bleached a number of times after that, some of it recouping. Other times, other places did not recoup as much. And so we're continuing to see that degradation of the Great Barrier Reef. How do you solve that problem? You need more monitoring. You need more data to help managers understand the reef more, understand where the most vulnerable pieces are and how you get that. How do you get that data? Like you got to remember that the Great Barrier Reef is the size of the US coast, the West Coast.

1:00:45 So if you go from the top of the border of Canada and the bottom of the top of the border at Mexico, that's the entire coastline. That's the entire size, the length of the Great Barrier Reef. How do you get all that data? We use these days with technology. You use citizen science and you use AI. And we're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast because we have the founding CEO of Citizens of the Reef, Andy Ridley, who's here to talk about his organization and what they've done to combine AI and citizen scientists to be able to create this huge database of data and be able to do what people haven't been able to do in a while and provide data for management models that are really helping out.

1:01:28 So I'm going to talk about that on today's episode and start the show. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And action is what we're going to be talking about today because Andy Ridley is here today. He is the founding CEO of Citizens of the Reef. And he's here to talk about what he took when he first heard about the barrier reef, the Great Barrier Reef, bleaching 10 years ago, took that sort of down moment and said, I'm going to turn it into something positive. I'm going to turn it into something optimistic. He was a serial entrepreneur before that.

1:02:08 He came back to Australia where he's from, from the Netherlands and was like, I want to do something good for the barrier reef. Came up with Citizens of the Reef with a couple of other mates. And look at that. I'm already talking Australian. I'm saying mates. Never mind. But I am. I'm really impressed with what him and his group were able to accomplish and have been able to accomplish using AI and citizen scientists. This is something where I can just imagine you want to do something for the ocean and you can do it from your own home, wherever you are in the world and just look at an image and categorize reefs into three categories. Right. One of the three categories or maybe multiple categories using AI. So it basically takes a snapshot.

1:02:49 Like people take pictures of the reef that gets sent to you. It comes up on your phone and you just kind of look at it and you say, OK, look at this outline that they I did. Is that a branching coral, a boulder coral or whatever? And then you just click and you confirm it. And then five other people get to see the same image and they click and confirm it. Right. So five people total. They get to click and confirm it. That's pretty incredible that you can do it. And you can just do that within minutes. Imagine doom scrolling for three hours on TikTok and you're like, ah, where the time go. But imagine you did that for like five to 10 minutes, looking at a series of photos to be able to say, hey, yeah, like this is this is this type of coral. This is this type of coral. This is this type of coral. And then you're you're helping the Great Barrier Reef recover and be able to maybe manage even better than it is now.

1:03:32 And hopefully stop from being bleached or stop from from dying off. And we're seeing each and every year. Just imagine that. Imagine taking something from your own living room or from your bathroom or from your walkout or from your commute. And you're just on your phone and you're helping the Great Barrier Reef and you're staring at images of the ocean. So you're connecting with the ocean halfway across the world or maybe you're on the coastline or wherever you are in the world. I think it's an amazing thing. I want you to hear this interview because Andy's just he's so inspiring for the work that he's been able to do. Such a creative genius in my in my opinion. And I just love for you to hear this interview. So here's the interview with Andrew Andy Ridley. He is the founding CEO of Citizens of the Reef. Enjoy the interview. And I will talk to you after.

1:04:14 Hey Andy. Welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Are you ready to talk about corals and conservation? Oh hey Andrew. Really nice to see you and you definitely. All right. I'm looking forward to this. This has been I know it's been on the on the docket for a while. We've planned this interview and I've been doing a lot of research. I've been doing it. It's been a lot of fun to dive in to Citizens of the Reef, which is your organization, which is the founding CEO. And so I'm looking forward to talking just about corals and conservation and where we're at with conservation and why you decided to put your two feet in and say, hey, look, we need to we need to help corals. We need to help them. You've got we're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about citizen science and how AI has improved citizen science.

1:04:54 We're going to talk a lot about the work you've done, some of the successes, some of the challenges that you're facing. And we're just going to get into all sorts of things. But before we do, Andy, why don't you just let the audience know who you are and what you do? Well, I am Andy. I live in I live in Cairns in northern Australia. So just just a few kilometers to my left is the Great Barrier Reef. Beautiful. And so we're based up here in Cairns. So Great Barrier Reef is very big. I'll give you a give you a kind of an idea. If you put the Great Barrier Reef up alongside the USA, it would go from above the border with Canada to below the border with Mexico.

1:05:39 So it's very bad. We're sort of about the third from the top is where we're based. Yeah. And we have started citizens eight years ago and it was off the back of I know your your listeners will have will know all about us. But we had these two very, very serious sequential bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef back in 2016 2017. And I think everyone kind of went into a state of shock to see what had happened and what was happening. I think the message that went around the world was the Great Barrier Reef had died. It hadn't died, but it was incredibly serious. It was like 90 some odd percent. Right. That bleached. I think is what it was. I think that was the headline. Yes. It's sort of spot it. So it's so in the northern end, there was really, really significant bleaching.

1:06:23 And as you know, you know, with bleaching, you get you get mortality if it's there for a long while. If the water remains hot and it's kind of doldrums kind of weather conditions, you'll start to get high mortality of the coral. But some parts of it did come back. Yeah. I think on the top of the reefs, you know, like the reef flat, you got on a very, very high levels of mortality coral. But anyway, we said we there was a sort of an emergency conference held in Townsville. Which is a city about four hours south of Cairns held by the Marine Park Authority. All of some of the top scientists were there. Yeah. And everybody was there. It's kind of like this almost a palpable sense of panic. Yeah. And that really was basically the question was, well, what are we going to do about it?

1:07:04 And one of the things that came out of that was we need much bigger data, much more information on what's going on across the whole of the system. And actually same same thing across all of tropical reefs around the world. And that's kind of where citizens sort of started. How would we do that? Knowing that we'll never have a billion dollars to build a research for Tila. How do we do that with, you know, the smell of an Ollie rag, which is kind of all we had. And that's kind of where citizens started. Well, this is incredible because, you know, to go to be inspired so much by such a disaster, like such a pessimistic thing that that's happened, right? When you see the Great Barrier Reef, which is like one of the wonders of the world. It's great. It's gorgeous.

1:07:44 People travel there, you know, just to see it, you know, on a regular basis from all over the world. And then it goes, it bleaches like the whole thing, you know, especially in the north where it's even more remote. You can argue and you're just like, what's going on here? Like, how do we do this? Now, let me put me in a situation like what were you feeling at that point? What were you doing before this started? Were you still involved in environmental things or because like what made you feel like, you know, you're going to go boom, no, we need to start something. We need to do something. Yeah, I think it really was driven by the event for me. So in I was actually working in Amsterdam on circular economy. I was running a circular economy organization called circular economy.

1:08:26 And I'd previously worked on I'd started a project called Earth Out, which is the sort of lights out in cities all over the world that that campaign. So I was always I've been in working in environment so for a long while. But as a me personally, passionately love diving. I love the great barrier reef is one of my favorite places on the planet. Maybe even my favorite most favorite place on the planet. So I was in Amsterdam when the first of those big bleaching has happened. And I'm 54 an hour when this happened. I'd been 44 or something. But yeah, my team that worked with me, I had about 30 people in that team and they're all much younger than me. And you could see the shock on their faces. These are like, essentially 20 year old 30 year olds in in in Amsterdam from all over the world, all working on circular economy stuff.

1:09:09 The great barrier reef had died, which is what it said on Twitter, right? Yeah. Was you could just see how emotionally it was affecting people. It was just like stunned. Imagine this extraordinary place. Now, thankfully, that wasn't totally the case. A lot of it survived. But some friends of mine were working on a project up in back in Australia, which was, you know, around, you know, how do you engage people in conservation on the great barrier reef and. They're asking my advice on it. And I was being really irritating and offering lots of advice. And they eventually went, oh, why don't you come and start this thing up? So that's kind of how I kind of got back to Australia, got the thing got rolling.

1:09:51 And then within a couple of weeks, we've been back in Australia. The second of the bleaching has happened. Right. Right. And I remember being out on the reef. I was out on more reef about 60 k's of 60 kilometres off Cairns offshore. So right on the outer reef here. And you can literally see the soft coral kind of peeling off the off the off the bedrock. And you're like, it was probably one of the most horrific. Yeah. Alarming. You know, it's just an it's melt, smelt of death. It was shocking. Now that that one in the water smelt even on the water. Totally. And there was a lot of kind of denial about it. Like a lot of people sort of like we can't talk about it because it's tourism and they're all kind of fair.

1:10:35 People have their livelihoods built on on this, you know, amazing place. But I think that what that did for us and with the Citizen Project was going, well, how like we're all talking about it. You can sign 100 petitions and not make a difference. What do we what are we going to do here right now at a very practical level? And as I was saying, you know, there's that conference was held in Townsville. And one of the biggest things that came out of it is there's just not enough information about what's going on, particularly given it's such a large area. Same size as Germany or Japan. It's a massive area. So we thought, right, well, yeah, we bought some of that crowd economy, shared economy, Earth Hour lessons and all that into it and started to build this kind of motley flotilla of boats that turned into, I guess, one of the biggest research flotillas in around, you know, and it's all run by locals and whether it be traditional and arrangers or tourism vessels or dive boats or even the odd super you can get lucky.

1:11:29 And that's how we kind of started the thing. So so you were right off the bat. I know that's in the name citizens of the reef, right? That's a that's a big part of it, where it's like, let's bring everybody together and let's let's try and solve this, like together, let's just figure out, we need we need more data, we need, we need more monitoring, we need information, as you mentioned before, right, that was the big those are the conclusions that came that came out of it's such a large place, you need to cover a lot of grounds. How, how did you build that? Did you build that community quickly? You know, where you had this flotilla of boats and stuff like, and how did that start? That's a really good question. So the answer is kind of yes and no. The no bit is, even after that meeting in Townsville, we knew that there was we almost sort of turned into a brief, you know, how would you get broad scale of constants from across such a large area when you haven't got enough money?

1:12:21 Yeah, and, and why were you doing that? So really big part of this is actually what you're really trying to do is trying to build a targeting system. So with minimal resources, where do you put them? And that's a question on the Great Barrier, but it's also a question for tropical reefs everywhere. In fact, it's kind of a question for conservation, terrestrial or in the marine environment. And, and I guess the other part of it was you never have enough assets, you never have enough money, etc, etc. So what resources do you have? And, you know, on the Great Barrier Reef, what when we first arrived here, what it felt like was you'd have skippers on boats or dive instructors who knew that race really well. Yeah, but we're not really involved in any meaningful way in conservation.

1:13:05 And yet they have all these years, you know, ever skipper has been working the reef for 30 years, they'll know more about the risk than any researcher. Right? So, and how do we tourism and fishing? Correct. Yeah, it's their livelihoods. And they generally passionately love the place that they work, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't stay there for so long. So so that sort of start to get those ingredients how to do it. But to be really honest with with you with citizens, the first three years, it was like a startup, it was we didn't have enough focus, we were struggling with, you know, how to do stuff, the technology wasn't good enough, you start from scratch, trying to think through a new problem, because essentially, it was, it felt like a new problem. And we took two years at least try and work out how to do to come up with like the basic idea. And then we started to pilot then COVID hit. And COVID was weird. If you're in Melbourne or Sydney, it was pretty terrible time in Australia.

1:13:58 I think Melbourne was the city with the longest lockdown. But I'm hearing cans, what happened to Kansas a tourist town. But what happened in Kansas, no one came to visit. But you still had all you still had all the tourist boats, you still had all the people, we had a thing in Australia called JobKeeper, which is where people got paid, even though, you know, it was just trying to keep essentially keep everyone eating and paying their rent. And so you had all these people who work in the industry, the marine industry up here, you had all these boats, they still have to run their engines. And so that was the first 2020 was COVID year. And we just managed to get the first of our motley flotilla out there and and started to capture photographs. It's sort of weirdly, a bit like kind of a Dunkirk moment, all the small boats going out to help. It was kind of, yeah, it's an interesting interesting thing to see. And what you realize more and more the more and more I work in this is that people who live on those routes love them passionately.

1:14:52 And, you know, a lot of them have got skin in the game, in terms of their jobs and their livelihood, but there is a deep love for this place. Well, and think about the challenges to right you you have this tragedy of bleaching and the largest coral reef barrier reef in the world. Yeah, you're trying to, you know, you get inspired you're like, okay, you know, you move from from the Netherlands to back to Australia with the family and everything and saying, all right, like, we're here to solve help solve this problem, do what we can monitoring, that's the thing. And then you go out, you try and get a bunch of people to go out, you have some passionate people who want to help out. And then a global pandemic hits, like, where everybody's got to stay inside, especially Australia, you guys struggle, like just like we did, where, you know, mandating continuing going back into into isolation, right, because of, you know, government protocols and so forth.

1:15:45 The challenges just keep building and building and building. How do you like, how do you fight that when you want to do something so good yet outside factors that you cannot control cause you to have like, was that a big setback for you in terms of getting people out? Well, it was weird because it's obviously circumstance that none of us had ever like, no one had seen this before. Right. And, and so I at one point, I was being you know, I have a board and I was under orders by the board to work out how to shut down the organization because there was a kind of view at one point, we're like, you're gonna run out of money, there's no tourists here, how are you gonna make it work.

1:16:27 But actually, I think I saw I did put probably a week's worth of work into trying to work out how to do that. And you know, you start to work out you're paying people too often, or service, it's really crappy kind of experience. And I think about a week into this, it's like, why are we doing this? Like, what, what, what, we just given up, right? And, and then you start to know, not really, but also, I think, I think is a state of mind as well. Yeah. Sometimes these things like with for us, for as terrible as it was, if you're in Melbourne, in, in cans, we didn't really, we had like six weeks of lockdown, right? Like hardly anything. Gotcha. And even then you still got a dog, you know, yeah. And other big cities, but we're what we because we can essentially a really remote city, right? You know, the nearest next out like Papua New, Port Moresby and Papua New Guinea is the nearest capital city to us, not Canberra or yet.

1:17:22 Right. So, so in a way, we just kind of lent into it and went, right, well, all these boats are here, all these people are here, people want something to do. And so we, we ran the first year and it kind of worked. And it set a tone of, of everyone working together and collaboration and trying to help each other out. And I get no one was competing with each other at the time, because there's no kind of operators competing with each other because there was no tourists. Right. So hard in a weird sort of way, very opportunistic, maybe it really helped. And it proved you can do it. And often I think with anything that you do in life, if it's news, half the issues is dealing with the skepticism of it won't work.

1:18:08 Right. So, so, you know, it actually gave us a bit of a bit of an opportunity. And, and, yeah, it was quite, I think it came almost as relief because everyone had a bit of a mission. Yeah, and they had time. They can spend a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd have people working in the dive industry who normally if they're going to dive boat, they're like chock is all day. I mean, you've been on dive boats, for sure. Right. So, you know, it's a 12 hour day, they're exhausted, they don't really have that much. It's like, you know, so you suddenly had all these people with all this experience, being able to spend hours in the water doing stuff and like, and essentially get paid for it. You know, in a weird, in a weird way, Andrew, it's like what the world should be like, like people being able to have people spending time, really couldn't do, you know, putting doing doing kind of cool stuff. That's what in a perfect world. That's what we'd be doing. Right.

1:19:00 Yeah, it's almost like taking and giving back, right? Like you're taking, you know, you're making money off the ocean, but you got to give back in the ocean. And obviously, this is nothing this is nothing against like eco tourism and tourism that the people the outfits that do it properly and take care of the reef while they're out there. But, you know, it's almost like they would if they had the time to do that, it'd be ideal. Right? Because they can spend a lot of their time to take care of the reef just as much as they as they use it. You know, I guess we were talking a bit about, we're talking about this before we kind of press the record. But I think it's a good idea. But it's this thing of kind of our world is pretty mixed up at the moment where the first thing, whereas we go through into these crazy times that we're in at the moment, the first thing to drop off is basically environment conservation, like the money just drops away almost immediately.

1:19:45 And, and yet, it's the place that we live and it's, there's a level of insanity to the fact that we're not investing the time and effort. And, you know, even the social capital into into looking after the place that we live, but it is, yeah, we live at the moment, it's pretty weird, but we're so disconnected, right? We're so disconnected from like a lot of us are disconnected from from the ocean, just by geography. But it's also, you know, in terms of thought process, I, I, I recorded and published an episode about a month ago about how we need to talk about the ocean more just in our regular conversations. So that we're not necessarily just a kind of way, but in a way that, Hey, you know what, I'd like to use the ocean or I like to be out on the ocean. The last time I was there, or, you know, I'm there, if you're there every day, like you said, you're a few kilometers away.

1:20:29 And I'm sure you're in the ocean quite a bit. You know, you just have to talk about that, that fun time. People on the coast, maybe, maybe take it for granted. They get to talk about it all the time. But, you know, people like myself who live in central Canada and you don't get, you get to see the Great Lakes, but you don't get to see the ocean. We need to talk about more, even if it's a river or a lake or something, you know, talk about the health talk, you know, in an optimistic kind of way. And then I feel like we get more connected, more top of mind in terms of regular decisions that we use in terms of like, you know, we always go over convenience over environment, I feel like, and we need to sort of get away from that. When we started to when we started this project, Great Recenter Project, one of the things around it was, again, you often come back to this thing of how much funding is that and it's never enough, right? And so you started to go, okay, well, what assets do we have that we don't have to pay for?

1:21:21 So I've been talking about this kind of motley flotilla, which was all the tourism boats and all this, you know, the tugs going out to service more in lines and stuff like that. But there's also this asset of people, just general virtual volunteers. And one of the things that covered really kind of accelerated was virtual voluntary because everyone was stuck at home and they're still trying to get some sort of sense of connection. And so, you know, we were trying to get a sense of connection with them. Yeah, but which was, again, fortuitous for what we're trying to do, because suddenly we had a kind of workforce available. But it is also slightly like it's something that's slightly not sort of irritates me a bit, but is that there is a default often I think in conservation and research to remove people and lean on technology or lead and and it whether you're talking about going out on the reef, there's a bit of a rice a passage to for a lot of people who are living in the communities here, particularly traditional owners actually, of spending time on sea country being in the water and like living and breathing it. It's an amazing thing to have in your life to your point.

1:22:26 For sure. But even with the virtual volunteering, it's like I think one of the rules that we had at the beginning when we're trying to set this thing up was, okay, how do you not engineer people out of this? How do you actually engineer them in and do that? And if can you do that in a meaningful way, can you do that in a way that isn't just kind of tokenistic or marking and I'm not I don't mean that in a critical way. I just mean, can you go to the next level, really? And so that's one of the things with the project with the census project. We're going, okay, if we were able to capture images from hundreds or even thousands of reefs across the Great Barrier Reef or across the world, what is the role of people in this? And that actually came to us as a kind of bit of a we had a bit of a crisis because the census project started to work really well.

1:23:13 And instead of but the first year we got like 14,000 images from about 140 reefs or something. The second year we got to 300 reefs and we had tens of thousands of images and we were leading we know experts were doing the analysis, but they were. It was super boring job. So they got kind of a board and didn't want to do it. And then you have to pay and we didn't have enough money. So there's a bit of a theme there. You notice Andrew. Yeah. So so we started we work with Dell, you know, the tech company and we were sort of looking at how do we can we build? Can we do this with AI? And on one hand, you need to go, maybe I can do all the analysis of these images in the image. You're basically looking for how much plate coral, boulder coral and branching cola is. And if it's got a lot, then you might have a key source free for a mother reef as the T.O.

1:24:03 Traditional owners call it. And so I was kind of looking for these these most important of all the reefs within the system. But we we tried a I we got it to around 70 percent as accurate as an expert, which is good, but not good enough. Yeah. So then we sort of went for our can we add the AI with the human eye and we built this hybrid system of both. And that's now like it takes about just under a minute to analyze an image. And it's as accurate as an expert within percent, like one or two percentage points. So how does it work now? So now you have like you have a system that's 70% accurate just on its own. And then you have a person, you know, that has a bit of an expertise or, you know, knowledge of corals. How does it work to make it even more accurate?

1:24:48 Yeah, so so we had this imaginary person in our heads who was commuting to work in Jakarta, totally person. Yeah. And therefore had a lot of commute time like four hours a day. And had a mobile phone. And then we had a mobile phone. And then we had a mobile phone. And smartphone. And therefore we want we wanted to be able to go could this person community in Jakarta every day, analyze an image in two minutes on their phone and do that once a day for five minutes. Almost like stop the doom scrolling, do that for five hours. Right. So sounds kind of our imaginary imaginary person. And so pretty much is kind of what we built, we built, we wanted it to be able to be used by somebody who's never been to the Great Barrier Reef or a reef.

1:25:28 That needs to be really simple. And we were looking for really simple stuff. When we first started the platform, we had like 164 options. And it was kind of ridiculous. That was our scientists wanted, oh, we need 164 categories. And of course, of course, it didn't really work. Right. So so now we were okay, actually, what we really want to know was how much plate coral, boulder coral and branching color is there? And what else is in there? Yeah, exactly. So so that's what we built. And, and we sort of think about, well, so the AI will draw a shape. You can look at this on gravy senses that all but the AI will draw a shape around and we'll draw a line around a shape. That's pretty good at picking out, like, boulder coral or branching or and then that image you'll get asked if you go onto the site, you'll get asked, okay, what do you see?

1:26:15 What's that boundary drawn around? What is it? Is it play call, Boulder coral or branching? You got a little tutorial first, but it's like super easy. But we want to design the whole system so that you need to you basically had to have no knowledge at all. Never been to the Great Barrier Reef, you don't need to know about coral, it's really, really simple. And so then every image gets analyzed by five different people. And it's the power of the crowd. So if five people are basically saying the same thing, you know that it's good chances play call. So there's a whole paper on this, which came out of University of Queensland, just looking at how accurate the data is because people are incredibly skeptical about science in the beginning. But actually, I think we're, I think it's actually the mass disruption to conservation.

1:27:02 And I think that's, I think both required, but also is going to be is probably going to be facilitated by AI, the reality that you can make a citizen anywhere valuable in a conservation role is quite a big breakthrough if we embrace it. So I'm looking at the website now, so I keep looking over to the right, by the way, and I'm looking at the video that you have, it's almost like a how to guide, or just initial guide in terms of like explaining how it's working. I don't have the sound on, of course, but I'm looking at you see that boulder branches, you know, kind of plate, and you just have to all you have to do, I guess, is just click and agree. And like, this is this is how you do it.

1:27:43 Yeah, it basically you'll have a few options down the left hand side and just go, so yeah, let's play. And even if you get it wrong, somebody else will get it right. Yeah, you have five basically the power of numbers, right? Just be like, No, no, actually, that's I would consider that this Yeah, I love this aspect. Have you gamified this a little bit to make it more enticing for people? Yeah, no, but so what we found was that. But firstly, I say this that school kids, sort of nine to 16 are incredibly good at this, but they're like, I'm like an old, annoying, you know, slow.

1:28:24 Yeah, compared to like an 11 year old who just be like, you know, just firing through the stuff is so quick. It's amazing. So, and but I reckon we look at who's doing this is basically about 30 school kids currently, a third is corporate volunteers that are companies and a third is just general public. So you've got it basically works with a lot of different people with gamified as extent of life, for example, at the moment, if you go on there, I think it's only in Australia, but I think we have an international one coming out. You know, if you every time you do five images, you win a ticket to basically a draw to come to the Great Barrier Reef and come out and look at some of the restoration sites we have out of the reef and stuff like that.

1:29:05 But what you could I mean, there is so much you could do to this in terms of gamification. I think it's still it's pretty cool platform, but it's still pretty rudimentary in comparison to what you could do to it. Yeah, oh, 100%. Like, this is yeah, right. So it's like Mark one, right? So yeah, so and I think the other part to that is at the moment, we're just looking for those three types of coral, but actually, we need to work with with Mars have a big restoration program, we'll read stars and we've been what they look for is fields of rubble next to healthy coral and you can put these kind of they're called Mars, very stars that basically stabilize the reef and you can put coral fragments on them and you can actually rebuild small areas of reef doing that.

1:29:45 It's very effective kind of restoration on small scale. But we are now using the data that we're capturing from all these photographs that coming in from across the Great Barrier Reef and other places to have to find those areas. So you can start to see, okay, well, step one was find these three types of hardcore step two could be, you know, fields of rubble and hardcore and you know, you can just keep doing more and more and more with this. I think the big challenge for us is not to design people out of it. I think it's a really critical. Yeah, you got to keep involved of conservation. Yeah. Well, it's a great way to connect them to to the Great Barrier Reef like people all over the world. Like you said in Jakarta and here in Burlington, Ontario, where I live or in the Arctic, even if they just have an app or they go on the website and they just like boom, boom, boom, boom, you do it and you're like, this is what corals look like.

1:30:30 This is what branching corals like we hear it all the time. You know, it used to be a marine aquarium hobbyist and I was like, this is really cool. I want to see these branching corals. I want to see what they look like in the wild. Yeah, I want to see what it's what a reef is supposed to look like. I mean, you don't always see that you may see it in documentaries and so but you're not really focused on that here. It's like something that's specifically focused on there and also like it's a great opportunity for an education tool. You know what I mean to like not only get through this stuff, but maybe like after like, you know, you do five or six, you get like a tidbit of information of like this is what branching corals are important for like there's such an opportunity. So many hours you mentioned this is the first this is the first iteration and you're just like, okay, like there's a there's a lot of opportunity here with how you can build this out and but the fact that you're getting people engaged like how many people have been a part of this so far have you have you been able to figure out the count of like how many people have actually started?

1:31:21 Yes, it's still it's still relatively new. I think we have about 12,000. So what we call super users that's people have done like a lot. Yeah, yeah. And so it's still relatively, actually relatively small. But what we at the moment, we're trying to build our workforce up to our virtual volunteering workforce up to about 60,000. If we had 60,000 people spending kind of five minutes of their time doing this, we could basically do all the analysis, the Great Barrier Reef in just a few hours. Yeah. So I think think about that. That's crazy. Right? We've got 12, I think we've got 12,000 something at the moment, right? Yeah, but it's 60,000. If everyone just gave five minutes. So at the moment, we're concentrating on Great Barrier Reef. But in in they've started to collect data in Hawaiian Islands. So there'll be a.

1:32:14 A version of this will be launched around World Ocean's Day in in Hawaii, and we're doing the same in the Red Sea, we're doing same in the Coral Triangle. So you start to look at this. Where this gets really interesting, and I think quite exciting is this idea of going, okay, we are the Great Barrier Reef, we've got lots of experience that we've learned here. But there is experience all over the world, often disconnected. There's basic stuff that we all need to understand and know whether that be, you know, what's going on between the different reef, essentially, reef connectivity, where if you've got limited resources, you're going to spend that resource, whether it be money or whether it be time or boat time or whatever. And what would you do on those reefs? And then what's working and what's not?

1:32:57 Because that's one of the other big things in conservation is you'll find there are mimicking projects everywhere in your find the be mimicking projects of ours, right? How do you get to a situation where you got, okay, let's try to pull this. How do we open source all of this? Yeah, and go right. Everyone's got it. You know, there is a there's essentially citizens, you got rights and responsibilities. So you can use all of this stuff, but your responsibilities then to feedback what you learn. Yeah. And where you get a restoration technique, for example, or stewardship sort of technique that's working really well, we want to know where it's not working really well, we also want to know so we don't so we don't do it. Well, it's a constant, it's a constant improvement, right? You're trying to improve the algorithms, you're trying to improve the AI, you're trying to improve people's interpretation of what they're seeing and then and then maybe even build on that if you can, you know, down the road.

1:33:47 Yeah, so you're the science is always going to be there. It's going to have to be there, right to make sure that that everything is accurate and whatnot. Right? And I think I think as I said before, you know, one of the great challenges in citizen science is because of where it's come from. It's still like a really early, you know, sort of a quite new topic almost for sure. In a way, it is, although you could sort of go back in history and go, well, actually, farmers have been scientists or their own land for years, years or, you know, so. Yeah, but but but it's definitely looked down on by the research community and for some in some cases for good reason, I think. But I think we're going into a very different age where it's it can become an incredibly useful tool to get massive scale up into places. So we don't have to fly people all over the world to do stuff you can actually do, you know, real locally based conservation.

1:34:33 You start to see those people as, you know, much more around the expertise can be transferred in a different way. Yeah. But so can the expertise on the recent cells come back and help other people all over the world. So I, you know, in a perfect world, I, you know, I sort of feel like there are massive opportunities here to really rethink in the same way that maybe Spotify changed the record industry, how you think about changing the conservation world and just bringing far more resource to it. That resource is not being used at the moment. Agree. We sort of look at screen time as a resource, right? So attention is almost like a currency. Yes, it is.

1:35:15 And one of the great things about podcasts is one of those rare times where people actually will sit down. They probably would have done with me nattering on but they listen to to to a long form kind of type conversation. But we have this thing in Australia, I think average Australia spends three hours and 15 minutes scrolling on their phone every day, like, you know, and I'm guilty that my kids are definitely guilty that even more than me. Yeah. But, you know, that's time that could be utilized. So we've got this kind of idea at the moment, which we're working on. And let's just like, you know, cap me, cap me, save the reef for five minutes and cap me. Does that kind of whole idea of like, how do you like take a break from doing it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do something good. You know, yeah.

1:35:58 Yeah, stop do scrolling. There's plenty of political reasons to stop do scrolling at the moment. So, you know, yeah, for sure. Well, your mental everybody's mental health needs a little break, I think, you know, to be able to stare at at reef, you know, like, like a beautiful reef, you know, and maybe sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's not. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you revisit it and see how it's doing. And has it recovered from a bleaching event? Or is it going through a bleaching event? Or sometimes you never know how are the how the photographs taken? It's really simple. So you if you take an average reef, you're trying to get all four sides of a reef. So the wild side, which normally in this case, places to the east, the, the lagoon side, which is the west side, and then the pressure points on either end, because it's a barrier reef. So that's kind of they're not so many fringing reefs here. Gotcha.

1:36:51 And then, and the pressure points, you know, where you get the big animals on either end normally. Yeah. So you have a lot of fish up here. And you take a you have two people in the water minimum two people in the water, 40 photographs in a GoPro about two to three meters away from the side of the reef. And you take a photograph every five kicks of your fins, you take 40 photographs, so you get 80 photographs across a survey. And you take a picture of the system. And this is like a very easy, easy system where one of the first challenges we had when we started this was actually wasn't that hard getting people to go out and take photographs. What was hard was getting the photographs off the GoPros.

1:37:31 We built this whole system that made right basically in Australia, what happens is you go out on the reef and then you come back and go to the pub and or maybe you go back to your family or something but often pub in this case. And then you start thinking, well, how do you get that? So we built the system and you basically come out of the water, you go prone immediately uploads. But like you put in a car somewhere and it uploads like from a computer basically Bluetooth it. It's really easy. Yes, super easy. Yeah. So essentially, the way the system works, I interrupt, but the way the system works is you have all these boats in the water from tourists, like tourist operations and so forth. They go in the water. They're in the water anyway, they have the GoPro. They're just there not only to make sure the tourists are having a good time, but also to make sure like to take a picture of the water. And also to make sure like to take these pictures every five kicks, you could even also include like the odd tourists to be able to do it too, because they might feel like this is a great way to look at the reef and wait to help if you need to.

1:38:22 But you have people in the water doing it with all these boats on the water and then they come once they're done their trip or their day, they come in that a series of photos, probably hundreds at that point, you know, for an entire day out on the water gets uploaded to the system and the system, you know, to basically distribute it out to the users to be able to. Make those go through the analysis, right? That's pretty much exactly that. Yeah. How long did it take you to get to that point, like where it's almost streamlined? I mean, I think we can we still streamlining. I think we're constantly streamlining actually. But it's been iterative. Yeah, it's been four or five years working on this. The first version was actually the first version.

1:39:06 Again, we were doing a lot of skepticism around just even the approach. Yeah, it was kind of interesting to deal with you because you have to deal with a lot of negativity, of course, but but now I feel like we've gone quite a long way past that. And I think the results in the scientific papers are out from University of Queensland, all this kind of stuff. So it makes a big difference. But it is a very different way of thinking about how you get scale. And and the idea that you can get scale, which is challenging, you know, without having, you know, a billion dollars. Yeah. And so so it has been iterative, but it accelerates every time you bring more talent into it, it basically helps it. And one of the interesting things, even the person who did the AI, the original set of AI, and I'm sorry, she currently works in Texas, but she was working in Sydney, and she'd never she was originally from India, and moved to Castle Hill in Sydney had never been in the ocean.

1:40:00 And yet she led the team that did the AI, which was, I think, pretty groundbreaking. I think no one had done it before. And, yeah, so we actually took her and there was a kind of cool though, we took her in the water for the fish had never been in the ocean. And one of my team, Yaz took her into into the ocean for the first time. And we were doing a doco for a streaming platform here in Australia. And they filmed it. It's just like one of the coolest bits that has been in the film. Yeah, her face just lights up because she's got a really, really amazing reef called Flynn reef, which is off cans and okay with them. Yeah, and it was, yeah, it's kind of all those life changing. Yeah, I mean, honestly, you see someone's eye like, you know, it's a bit of a, it's an amazing thing to go on the roof. You know, you see people's eyes like light up in a way that, you know, you'd only see in the Serengeti or someone like that, you know, for sure.

1:40:51 Very simple. I love it. I this is such a cool thing to do. And then now when you get all that data, I mean, obviously, that's been your focus is like, okay, let's get the data. Let's let's try and figure out let's get this analysis done. What's what do you do with the data after that? Like, do you have some house that that analyze it and look at coverage makeup maps like in a GIS or something? Or do you hand it over to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park? Yeah, great. It's a lot of data. It's a lot of data. It's a lot of data. And it's a new it's a new type of data because it's broad scale reconnaissance. It's not sort of hyper like accurate quadrant kind of, you know, what's happening in the square meter. It's more like seascape.

1:41:32 But but that was kind of what was asked for in the beginning. So the data goes into this project, a partnership with University of Queensland, the Marine Spatial Ecology Lab, a guy, a guy they call Pete, Pete Mumbi, Professor Pete Mumbi. Not well known, I guess. I'm sorry. Guys like we're renowned. Yeah, yeah, he is a he unusually he was a bit at bigger advocate for this from the beginning has been kind of what I helped started basically. So it goes into his lab. And we have. And then that data is used for the modeling. I think it's providing about 50% of the modeling data that then goes back to the Marine Park Authority, particularly to guide their crown of thorns starfish culling boats. Yeah, we have a an animal that's on the Great Barrier Reef. I'm sure you know, it's hundred by which for crown of thorns starfish. Yeah, it's an incredibly efficient eater of coral. Yes.

1:42:28 And and I think is responsible currently for about 50% of the coral loss on the Great Barrier Reef. Yeah, soon to be and already probably superseded by climate change, but so they have a I think six boats to go up and down the Great Barrier Reef culling swarms of crown of thorns starfish. The pro how do you product how do you, you know, find which reefs to go to to go looking for those crown of thorns starfish, particularly looking for where is there a high amount of food source for crown of thorns starfish rather than looking for the crown of thorns itself. That data that we're collecting for census is going into that program at the marine parks. And I think it's getting better and better and better and more useful. But we're also now using it. So I said before, I think it's like we've tried to design essentially a targeting system to go right if you've if you're going to intervene in some way could be better stewardship could be restoration could be anything in between. How do you pick your places? And that's what the data? That's what we're really interested in is how do you create a future?

1:43:29 And I think that's a far more efficient way of helping a community choose where it's going to put its limited resources to help conserve and protect reefs in their own backyard. And does that mean the start in a row? Does that mean the data that you're providing has to be more accurate? Because right now you're at like you said, you're at a broad scale. You're looking at boulder, you know, rubble, branching corals, plate corals, which is good to identify, you know, obviously, yeah, does that mean like to get those types of spaces? Does that mean in certain areas, you're going to spend more time and to be a little bit more accurate to identify to genus or species and some if that's even possible?

1:44:13 Not not at the moment, though. I know that we're working on sort of quite hard challenge of trying to start to identify soft coral as well as much harder. Interesting to identify using AI, etc. And even human eye, it's much harder. Right. We're still working on that moment with different color treatments and different sort of approaches. But the first iteration is was let's find these key source reefs and start to use that to help with reef connectivity mapping and all this kind of stuff that's Pete's work. But I was just talking about this example of the Mars reef stars. So this is basically rebuilding architecture on reefs that have been hammered by cyclones or very severe bleaching. And then what they're looking for is rubble fields next to good coral. Good, you know, right. So you need both good rubble field, good high corals, because that's where your fragments going to come from to help rebuild that. So using the data to start to be more specific. Okay, well, can we find rubble fields in this area?

1:45:08 Information. And then can we map that against the good coral so that you start to see how we still quite early versions of this. But what you start to do is build up much better pictures of what's going on in a much, much bigger area. Yeah. And also, if you think about someone like great barrier reef, you could have restoration programs, but they normally need a lot of logistics and resources. How do you change that and think about how can you do that at a much, much lower cost? Yeah, and at a very an all being done by locals. No one's flying in no one, you know, thinking about how you build a system that can do that and share those insights from like top scientists like Pete with a community in the Philippines that normally wouldn't get access to those insights, but also vice versa, sharing what they're learning on their recent they fish on and they're like, oh, I'm not going to do that.

1:46:07 Yeah, it is a, it's, as I said, it's kind of thinking about everything almost much more like a shared economy. Yeah, like everyone's in. Everyone has a part to play, whether you're a world's top research on to store, you know, looking for a place to be. Fishy village in the Philippines, you're all important. Absolutely. And if and that's the great part of it, you just get you feel so good for, for like maybe five minutes of work a day, if you really think about it, you know, it's insane to know and to understand how impactful it is. insane to know and to understand how impactful it is from a project point of view. The amount of data that you're producing to go into a lab like Peter Mumbi's lab and to be able to output the resource that it's outputting, this is a huge game changer in terms of managing the Great Barrier Reef.

1:46:59 I'm not saying it's going to improve the Great Barrier Reef like that, but it's going to allow, like you said, to identify points that may need a little bit more help or maybe more analysis to say, "How can we help these areas? Are these the most vulnerable areas? Are they not?" There's so many applications to this and it seems like you're just getting started in this type of work. I think, I mean, really good points. I think the thing as well is like we've had, it's been a very, everyone will know this, it's been a really tough start to the year with USAID being pulled and all this kind of stuff. And so instead of there being more funds and resources for conservation, there's definitely seeing like billions of dollars less basically what feels like 100%.

1:47:41 And I just sort of, I think we all feel like we can't just, you know, we've got to come up with a way of being able to bypass that problem. Yeah. You know, and not just because we all love reefs and we care about what happens to them, but there are ways of doing it. And I think that's kind of weird sort of weirdly, we did design this knowing obviously that this was going to happen, the USAID stuff and this massive drop in income. Yeah. But I think, you know, it's, I had a boss once who said that luck was opportunity meets preparation. And in a weird sort of way, I feel like we've kind of done that by accident.

1:48:23 Yeah. It is a system that we've tried to build that can be scaled to anywhere in the world. And we know that our tropical reefs, you know, as a billion people rely on them for their livelihoods, you know, 25% of the world's species marine species will spend some time on tropical reefs. There's all these kind of massive stats statistics that go, should we really need to look after these places? Yeah. And so how are we going to do that without, you know, in this new paradigm that we live in? We've got to think differently. Agreed. I completely agree. We were talking a little bit about, you know, before we started recording, we talked about how basically how to how to solve the world for conservation. Yeah. In terms of conservation funding.

1:49:03 We did, by the way. We fixed it. It's all good. We'll do that for another episode. We'll let you know about it. But it's true. I mean, like there's definitely, you know, we can't rely on necessarily on certain on certain governments. We've learned that from the share, even their own where our own government sometimes, you know, we'll switch their priorities. Conservation has to be monetized in a certain way. How that's going to happen. There's a lot of different models out there that may or may not work. It's going to be tested. But I think, you know, as you mentioned, too, before we record, it's very difficult because you have to dedicate like 60 to 70 percent of your time to fundraise, to come up with some sort of way to be able to get this going and get this moving so that you can do the work that you really want to do, which could be quite impactful.

1:49:46 It just, you know, just need a bit of funding to go through and and pay the people that deserve to be paid and, you know, monetize it in certain ways that it's just being funded. And I think it's so funny because like you look at certain people in the world who are billionaires and then you have others who are and they're and they're making money after money after money on on fearless things. And then you look at what you what we're trying to do here in the nonprofit world, the conservation world to say, we just want to we just want to bring this back or we just want to protect what we have. And we're not looking to make, you know, millions and millions of dollars. We're just trying to protect like our mission is to protect if we can do that with the right amount of money. Here's what it requires. You can do a lot of great things. And I think I think it's really we're going to have to see a change in the funding models in the monetization models of this type of work so that we can be more impactful and not rely on the billionaires and the big foundations as much as we as we did because there are more people trying to get into this game and trying to do that.

1:50:46 And so I think it's really important to do some work, some great work, but it's harder to get funding. So that's that's always definitely tough. And with that said, there is a donate button on the website. So we're going to link to that. So people want to donate. They get inspired by this podcast and what you're saying. And the fact that you can actually do quite a bit. You know, please go donate. We'll put that in the show notes. So, you know, feel free to do that. But, you know, Andy, this has been great. I know you and I could probably talk for hours and hours on end. But I'd love to invite you back on to talk more about the projects, you know, at Citizen of the Reef and to be able to, you know, this was kind of a it was kind of fun because it was like not only getting to know you, but a bit of a workshopping type of episode. And I think people got to listen in on this, which I think is a really, really fun episode to do. But I'd love to invite you back on or even there's a fun to talk about your the work that you're doing.

1:51:30 But you're the work that you guys are doing and how helpful it is and all the the improvements that you're able to make and to these systems and to the reef. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Hey, thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for getting us on and yes, cool cool podcast. So, you know, Andrew. Yeah, thanks, man. You love to come back on or get someone more interesting from a team to come on, but it's been a pleasure. You've been you notice like to give them extremely long answers to all the questions. Sorry about this, is what a podcast is for. four. I talk a lot. That's why I started the podcast. I'm in my office by myself talking to you, which is great. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Andy. We really appreciate it. Yes, thanks, Matt. Thank you, Andy, for joining us on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

1:52:14 It was great to have you on, and I mean that. I often get inspired by the guests that I have on, hence why I have them on. This was one of those episodes. I get completely inspired in the impact that this has been able to have. Andy talks about how the data goes to Pete Mumbi's lab at University of Queensland, and it goes into their spatial ecology lab. They run models. It's continuing to increase in the percentage. I think it's 50%. He said during the interview of how much it contributes to the models that they run, looking at the broad scale shape and size of the reef and what's healthy, what's not. It's really cool to see. I think it's phenomenal, and I want to see more of this. I'm so happy that I got to speak to Andy today and to be able to say, "Hey, you know what? This is an impactful reef." What I love about this is I have this podcast. I have this platform, and Andy's team reached out.

1:53:06 Actually, Andy reached out. He's like, "Hey, I'd love to be on your podcast." He was a communications person. I'm just like, "Yeah, this is awesome. Let's do this." I never would have known. This is the thing that I love about this area of podcasting and social media is that as I put out more episodes, people hear it. Andy said he's been listening to us for a while. People hear it. He's like, "Yeah, I want to share my story." They contact me. We connect, and we share the story, and then you get to listen to it, and it gets to go out worldwide, and I just love it. GreatReefCensus.org. GreatReefCensus.org is the website. I want you to go visit it. I want you to be one of the, right now, 12,000 people. He wants to get 60,000 people to be able to pick Reef's and be able to categorize it. It's a great way to train yourself into understanding Reef's for all you early career scientists that want to work on Reef's.

1:53:55 It's a great way to contribute to conservation for all those people who want to contribute to conservation, and it's going to be a lot of fun to go through it and to see this evolution of this program and where it's going to go. He's talking about going to other Reef's around the world. It's all needed. We need the help. We need the people. We need you as citizen scientists, and you can become a citizen scientist for free. Isn't that wonderful? For free. So let's get on that. I'd love to hear your experience. So hit me up on Instagram at How to Protect the Ocean. If you've signed up or you've been signed up for a long time, let me know. But also let me know in the comments if you're watching this on YouTube. Just let me know what you think of this program. If you've signed up or you've been a part of it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you so much to Andy for joining us.

1:54:37 Thank you for his team for the work that he does and the work he and his team do, and we want to thank you for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the true north strong and free and soon to be citizen scientists looking at Reef's on a very daily basis. I can't wait to do that. But thank you so much for joining us on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.