This past winter, the warm waters of El Niño hit the coral reefs in the Maldives hard. But assessing their destruction is tough when the primary tool for sizing up corals is a measuring tape wielded by a scuba-diving scientist. “It's crazy how behind the times we are,” says Sly Lee, a former biological science technician for the US National Park Service and founder of the Hydrous, a science communication non-profit. “We can decode coral genomes, but we can't accurately track how fast the corals are degrading.” At least, no one could until Lee came up with a better yardstick: a 3-D-modeling system that shows fine-grained changes in their surface area, size, and color.
To capture the corals, Lee applies the same method he and a team of researchers used in 2014 to create a 3-D model of the barnacle-ridden USS Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor. In December, before El Niño hit, Lee dove with a waterproof camera to take nearly 200,000 images of the reefs from every angle. Then he uploaded the photos to Autodesk rendering software, stitching them together into a high-resolution model. Later this year, he'll return to the same corals, then use the before-and-after visualizations to see exactly how they have fared. And once the software gets more widely distributed, using divers everywhere to track coral degradation will be as easy as pointing and shooting. With enough contributions, Lee says, “we could create an online catalog of all the corals in the world.” So grab your snorkels, citizen scientists, and get snapping.
Autodesk made this 3-D print of a table coral photographed in the Maldives by the Hydrous. The pinkish 3- by 3-inch segment of PVC pipe (front left) is a size reference for the modeling software
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/3d-modeled-coral/
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