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

Episode Transcript
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(01:00:03):
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.

(01:00:23):
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

(01:00:45):
Coast.
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

(01:01:07):
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.

(01:01:28):
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.

(01:01:49):
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.
He came back to Australia where he's

(01:02:10):
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.

(01:02:32):
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.
Like people take pictures of the reef
that gets sent to you.
It comes up on your phone and you just

(01:02:54):
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,

(01:03:15):
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.
And hopefully stop from being bleached or
stop from from dying off.

(01:03:36):
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

(01:03:57):
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.
Hey Andy.
Welcome to the How to
Protect the Ocean podcast.
Are you ready to talk

(01:04:18):
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.

(01:04:38):
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.
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.

(01:04:59):
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.

(01:05:19):
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.
So it's very bad.

(01:05:40):
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.

(01:06:00):
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

(01:06:21):
really, really significant bleaching.
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.

(01:06:42):
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

(01:07:03):
are we going to do about it?
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

(01:07:24):
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.
People travel there, you know, just to

(01:07:46):
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?

(01:08:08):
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.
And I'd previously worked on I'd started

(01:08:28):
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.

(01:08:49):
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.

(01:09:09):
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

(01:09:30):
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.

(01:09:51):
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.

(01:10:13):
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

(01:10:33):
and they're all kind of fair.
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

(01:10:55):
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

(01:11:16):
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.
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,

(01:11:37):
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

(01:11:57):
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

(01:12:18):
know, how would you get broad scale of
constants from across such a large area
when you haven't got enough money?
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,

(01:12:38):
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

(01:12:59):
race really well. Yeah, but we're not
really involved in any
meaningful way in conservation.
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,

(01:13:20):
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.

(01:13:41):
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.
I think Melbourne was the
city with the longest lockdown.
But I'm hearing cans, what happened to

(01:14:04):
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

(01:14:24):
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

(01:14:45):
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.
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

(01:15:08):
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.

(01:15:29):
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.
The challenges just keep building and
building and building.

(01:15:50):
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.

(01:16:12):
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.
But actually, I think I saw I did put
probably a week's worth of work into

(01:16:32):
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

(01:16:53):
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

(01:17:14):
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.
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.

(01:17:35):
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

(01:17:58):
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.
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.

(01:18:19):
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

(01:18:40):
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.
Yeah, it's almost like taking and giving

(01:19:02):
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

(01:19:23):
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,

(01:19:43):
like the money just drops
away almost immediately.
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

(01:20:05):
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

(01:20:26):
was there, or, you know, I'm there, if
you're there every day, like you said,
you're a few kilometers away.
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

(01:20:46):
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

(01:21:07):
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?
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

(01:21:28):
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

(01:21:49):
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

(01:22:10):
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.
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

(01:22:32):
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

(01:22:52):
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.

(01:23:13):
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

(01:23:34):
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

(01:23:55):
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.
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.

(01:24:15):
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%

(01:24:36):
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?
Yeah, so so we had this imaginary person
in our heads who was commuting to work in
Jakarta, totally person. Yeah. And

(01:24:56):
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

(01:25:17):
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.
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

(01:25:38):
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.

(01:26:00):
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?
What's that boundary drawn around? What
is it? Is it play call, Boulder coral or
branching? You got a little tutorial

(01:26:22):
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

(01:26:42):
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.
And I think that's, I think both

(01:27:04):
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

(01:27:25):
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.
Yeah, it basically you'll have a few

(01:27:45):
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.

(01:28:08):
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.
Yeah, compared to like an 11 year old who
just be like, you know, just firing

(01:28:29):
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

(01:28:50):
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.
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

(01:29:10):
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

(01:29:33):
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.
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

(01:29:53):
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.

(01:30:15):
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.
This is what branching corals like we
hear it all the time. You know, it used
to be a marine aquarium hobbyist and I

(01:30:35):
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

(01:30:56):
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

(01:31:17):
this so far have you have you been able
to figure out the count of like how many
people have actually started?
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

(01:31:37):
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

(01:32:00):
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.
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

(01:32:20):
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

(01:32:40):
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?
Because that's one of the other big
things in conservation is you'll find
there are mimicking projects everywhere

(01:33:01):
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.

(01:33:24):
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,

(01:33:45):
you know, down the road.
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

(01:34:06):
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

(01:34:26):
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.
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.

(01:34:47):
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

(01:35:08):
moment. Agree. We sort of look at screen
time as a resource, right? So attention
is almost like a currency. Yes, it is.
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

(01:35:29):
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

(01:35:50):
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.
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

(01:36:12):
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

(01:36:32):
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.
And then, and the pressure points, you

(01:36:52):
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

(01:37:13):
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.
We built this whole system that made
right basically in Australia, what

(01:37:34):
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.

(01:37:56):
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

(01:38:18):
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.
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

(01:38:38):
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

(01:38:58):
iterative. Yeah, it's been four or five
years working on this. The first version
was actually the first version.
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.

(01:39:18):
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,

(01:39:40):
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.

(01:40:00):
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

(01:40:20):
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

(01:40:41):
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.
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

(01:41:03):
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

(01:41:23):
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.
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

(01:41:44):
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

(01:42:05):
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.

(01:42:28):
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

(01:42:49):
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

(01:43:11):
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?
And I think that's a far more efficient
way of helping a community choose where

(01:43:32):
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,

(01:43:53):
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?

(01:44:13):
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

(01:44:36):
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

(01:44:57):
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 wefind rubble fields in this area?
Information. And then can we map that
against the good coral so that you start
to see how we still quite early versions

(01:45:19):
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

(01:45:41):
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.

(01:46:07):
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

(01:46:28):
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

(01:46:48):
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.
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

(01:47:09):
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

(01:47:30):
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%.
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.

(01:47:52):
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

(01:48:15):
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.
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,

(01:48:36):
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

(01:48:57):
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.
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

(01:49:18):
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

(01:49:39):
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.
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

(01:50:00):
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

(01:50:21):
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

(01:50:44):
because there are more people trying to
get into this game and trying to do that.
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,

(01:51:05):
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

(01:51:25):
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.
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.

(01:51:45):
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

(01:52:05):
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.
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

(01:52:26):
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

(01:52:47):
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.
Actually, Andy reached out.

(01:53:07):
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.

(01:53:28):
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

(01:53:48):
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.
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

(01:54:10):
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

(01:54:30):
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.
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.

(01:54:53):
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.

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