Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation
Providing science-based solutions to protect and restore ocean health
In Nature By Gemma Conroy April 14, 2023 Detailed analysis of the January 2022 event shows how underwater blasts generated huge waves that battered coastlines throughout the island nation. The events following last year’s massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the …
Published in Science Advances Abstract The 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption generated a once-in-a-century magnitude tsunami. The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) volcanic eruption in January 2022 generated a catastrophic tsunami and contends for the largest natural explosion in more than a …
A new study led by scientists at the University of Miami and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation measured the size of the Tongan tsunami and found that it was similar in size to the one caused by the …
Recently, I participated in the Saudi National Center for Wildlife (NCW), workshop on managing outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The event took place in Riyadh, where experts from around the world were invited to share …
Lately, you have been hearing from our partners at the University of Miami (UM) about their experiences processing and picking tiny foraminifera from sand samples that we collected on the Global Reef Expedition (GRE). As our colleagues continue to process the large quantity (2,500) of sand samples, we are creating an educator’s guide called “Little Creatures with a Big Message.”
Together, the University of Miami and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to utilize microscopic organisms, called foraminifera (‘forams’ for short), to assess the state of coral reefs over the past 1,000 years, and potentially create new metrics that can be used to assess reef health.
NSF recognizes that a critical component to any research project is how it can benefit society. This is what NSF defines as the “Broader Impacts.” As a part of this grant, we will deliver on the broader impacts portion of the grant to educate and communicate this science to others. One of the ways will do this is by creating curriculum that improves STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and increases participation of minorities in STEM.
The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation makes ArcGIS StoryMaps to guide people through our maps and data, tell key conservation stories, and showcase our findings from the Global Reef Expedition. Mapping our Planet’s Coral Reefs This StoryMap guides …
This guest blog was written by Nora Downing, an undergraduate student at the University of Miami working in the Foram Lab. Her work is helping build an index of coral reef health using benthic foraminifera picked from sand samples collected …
Hello, my name is Meghan Doyle and I am a senior at the University of Miami, majoring in marine science and biology, as well as a volunteer in the Foram Lab. During my time as a lab assistant, I have …
The Science Without Borders®: Conserving the Tropics project was developed by the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation to help address the United Nations Ocean Decade Challenge to “understand the effects of multiple stressors on ocean ecosystems, and develop solutions to monitor, protect, manage and restore ecosystems and their biodiversity under changing environmental, social and climate conditions.”
Our project focuses primarily on conserving tropical marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and mangrove forests, as well as incorporating measurable actions that communities can use to reach their conservation goals.
The Science Without Borders®: Conserving the Tropics project uses a co-design approach to help coastal communities improve ocean literacy and develop science-based solutions to conserve their tropical marine ecosystems…
With compelling evidence that we have lost half of the world’s tropical coral reefs over the last few decades, there is an urgent need to understand their overall health. Without this basic information to use as a baseline, it is near impossible to mount a response to the so-called global reef crisis. The most straightforward method we have for monitoring reefs is conducting SCUBA diver surveys. However, this type of field work is logistically and financially challenging to execute on large scales, so developing a new method to monitor reefs remotely is key.
In attempt to find a solution, Anna Bakker combines the fields of remote sensing, computer science, and ecology to measure reef health from space. Recently, Anna published a paper in Coral Reefs, which utilized the Living Oceans Foundation’s Global Reef Expedition field dataset to build a model that can predict coral cover and other metrics of coral reef health using open-source satellite data.
