NSF Abstract

As the climate changes, coastal communities are putting greater value on the ability of nearshore marine ecosystems to dissipate storm surges and protect human infrastructure and livelihoods. Thus, coastal ecosystem stewardship and restoration is increasingly viewed as a smart ecologic and economic investment in ?green? infrastructure. This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) planning process brings together university scientists, community representatives and businesses, and civic entities to co-design a science/research-based, implementable, scalable, and sustainable solution that tackles a critical challenge: Coral reef degradation and destruction due to climate change. This is a challenge that needs to be addressed to increase island and tropical community resilience and protection from sea level rise and erosion caused by increased storm frequency and intensity. This project, and its planning team, work to address the coastal protection problem by employing advanced technology for the monitoring and restoration of coral reefs using the U.S. Virgin Islands as a pilot. For island communities, like those in the Virgin islands, coral reefs are the natural and premier frontline barrier that mitigates onshore destruction of harbor installations, homes, businesses, and other installed infrastructure from damaging wave action and storm surges. For this CIVIC planning process the science team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography brings new technology (large-area imaging) to the table, working with the community-based U.S. Virgin Island Restoration of Coral Squad, to co-create an implementation plan for deploying an innovative coral reef monitoring and technology training regimen to keep track of local coral reef degradation and monitor the effectiveness of community reef restoration efforts. Civic partners engaged in this effort include local businesses, non-profits, and government agencies who want to work with academic partners who have expertise in techniques that can help them in their fight to maintain health coral reefs around their islands. Together, the scientists and community are co-designing with what could be an effective model for community-university exchange, scalability, and sustainability for community use of new technology (i.e., large-area imaging) and utilizing its benefits for improving coastal community resilience. Broader impacts of the work include deployment of a novel technology to enable more informed means of monitoring and checking the health of coral reefs and efforts to maintain them in a warming ocean world and training of local residents and civic partners in the use and utility of the technology and working closely with university scientists. The work will also engage students from the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The project involves the use of a technology new to ocean science: Large-area imaging technology (a.k.a. photogrammetry). It can enhance and accelerate coastal restoration by creating a visual ?digital twin? that can be used to gauge the relative success of reef degradation and the effectiveness of different restoration approaches. This CIVIC planning process brings together a network of scientists, a novel technology, and accessible online tools and image processing techniques to help island communities, like those in the US Virgin Islands, better monitor fringing coral reef health. The value of large-area imaging is that it provides a visual understanding of the results of outcomes of the interaction between rising ocean temperature and coral reef ecosystem health. While this technology offers immense potential, financial and technical limitations have prevent widespread uptake outside of academic circles. Surveys of individuals working in marine ecosystem stewardship and restoration have documented systemic inequities in access to emerging technologies such as large-area imaging. These challenges are linked, in some cases, to financial constraints; but many are linked to uneven investment in user training and in access to the technology and technology-enabled workflows. The goal of this collaboration and planning process is to have scientists and end-user stakeholders identify impediments to access in the context of coral restoration in the US Virgin Islands. A multi-stakeholder meeting in the US Virgin Islands will provide community-wide perspectives that will help in the co-design of potential solutions. This will result in access to advanced technology and training in its use to accelerate the learning and technology implementation needed to build more climate-ready marine ecosystems. This planning process will improve the understanding how community-based efforts can be designed to provide improved nature-based solutions to climate change. It will also foster and strengthen collaboration between researchers and community stakeholders, develop new collaborations and partnerships, refine the research vision to enable submission of a successful follow-on proposal that will implement the community vision, and provide data to address research questions and develop evaluation methods and measures for the follow-on project.

This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program?s Track A. Climate and Environmental Instability - Building Resilient Communities through Co-Design, Adaption, and Mitigation and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. The project was funded by the NSF Director for Geosciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Abstract #2431301