Massive Citizen Science Effort Seeks To Survey The Entire Great Barrier Reef

a post by Azra Raza for 3 Quarks Daily: Jessica Wynne Lockhart in Smithsonian:

Only about 1,000 of 3,000 individual reefs have been documented, but the Great Reef Census hopes to fill in the gaps


By collecting images and GPS data from citizen divers, scientists can get a better sense of the health of the entire Great Barrier Reef. (Damian Bennett)

In August, marine biologists Johnny Gaskell and Peter Mumby and a team of researchers boarded a boat headed into unknown waters off the coasts of Australia. For 14 long hours, they ploughed over 200 nautical miles, a Google Maps cache as their only guide. Just before dawn, they arrived at their destination of a previously uncharted blue hole—a cavernous opening descending through the seafloor. After the rough night, Mumby was rewarded with something he hadn’t seen in his 30-year career. The reef surrounding the blue hole had nearly 100 percent healthy coral cover. Such a find is rare in the Great Barrier Reef, where coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 led to headlines proclaiming the reef “dead.”

“It made me think, ‘this is the story that people need to hear,’” Mumby says.

The expedition from Daydream Island off the coast of Queensland was a pilot program to test the methodology for the Great Reef Census, a citizen science project headed by Andy Ridley, founder of the annual conservation event Earth Hour. His latest organization, Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, has set the ambitious goal of surveying the entire 1,400-mile-long reef system in 2020. “We’re trying to gain a broader understanding on the status of the reef—what’s been damaged, where the high value corals are, what’s recovering and what’s not,” Ridley says. While considered one of the best managed reef systems in the world, much of the Great Barrier Reef remains un-surveyed, mainly owing to its sheer size. Currently, data (much of it outdated) only exists on about 1,000 of the Great Barrier’s estimated 3,000 individual reefs, while a mere 100 reefs are actively monitored.

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Understanding Prosperity in East London: Local Meanings and “Sticky” Measures of the Good Life

an article by Henrietta L. Moore and Saffron Woodcraft (UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, UK) published in City & Society Volume 31 Issue 2 (August 2019)

Abstract

The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been conceived as a global roadmap for peace, dignity, and prosperity on a healthy planet (UNDP 2016). The SDGs challenge the dominant notion of prosperity as material wealth measured by GDP and rising household incomes; instead prosperity is reframed as a shared condition to be weighed alongside ending poverty, tackling inequalities, and safeguarding the environment.

Cities are identified as having a critical role in generating and equitably distributing prosperity on these terms.

Reframing prosperity in this way opens up space for new forms of dialogue about what it means for people everywhere to prosper, asking how material wealth, other forms of value, equity, and fairness, and the needs of humans and nonhumans are differentially understood and acted on. Yet this article argues that prosperity is understudied and undertheorized by social scientists.

A new research agenda, driven by empirical studies in diverse urban contexts, must form the basis for new theoretical insights and policy formation that will drive action on prosperity in the years to come.

Presenting new empirical work from community‐led research in three east London neighborhoods, the article examines prosperity as a lived experience in comparison to policy goal, demonstrating how context‐specific meanings and practices challenge the orthodox models and metrics that currently dominate policymaking.

The authors demonstrate how situated and engaged research with local residents and citizen scientists provides the basis for developing new prosperity metrics that reflect issues of specific value and concern to individuals and communities in east London.

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