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Vote for your favorite artwork in the Science Without Borders® Challenge!

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The Khaled Bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation has introduced a new prize in the Science Without Borders® Challenge—and you can help select the winners!

Join us on Facebook to vote for your favorite entries to our annual student art contest. Finalists with the most likes in each category by Monday, May 23rd will receive the new “People’s Choice” award along with a $50 scholarship.

A winner will be chosen from each of the categories, one for younger students 11-14 years old, and another for older students, 15-19 years old. All you have to do to participate is “like” your favorite images in our finalist galleries on Facebook:

Finalists of the 2022 Science Without Borders Challenge (Ages 15-19)!

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Last week, we proudly announced the finalists in the ages 11-14 category of our 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge. Today, we are excited to announce the 15-19 year-old finalists of our art contest.

Contest finalists are from China, Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The theme, “Ridge to Reef” was portrayed in the students’ artwork through a variety of different actions such as planting corals, cleaning up pollution, preventing overfishing, and planting trees. We were amazed by these students’ creativity, execution of the theme, and artistic abilities.

Without further ado, please meet our 15-19 year old finalists:

Announcing the 11-14 Year-Old Finalists of the 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge!

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The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is pleased to announce the finalists of the 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge, our annual student art competition. This year we asked students to create a piece of art that illustrates one or more actions that governments, non-profits, park managers, and indigenous communities can take to preserve coral reefs using a ridge to reef approach to conservation. We are thrilled with the entries that we received!

We received 510 qualifying pieces of artwork from 49 different countries, so picking the finalists was a difficult decision. Ultimately, finalists were chosen based on how well the artwork exemplified this year’s theme, the quality of the artwork, and the creativity and originality of their artwork.

We hope you will be as impressed with the submissions we received as we were. Without further ado, here are the finalists for Ages 11-14 of the 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge:

Meet the Interns: Joana Oliveira

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The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is hosting two interns this semester from the University of Ghent’s International Master of Science in Marine Biological Resources (IMBRSea) program. This international program focuses on marine resource management and conservation, and provides students with the opportunity to conduct a professional practice in their field.

One of our interns, Joana Oliveira, will be helping the Foundation create StoryMaps to showcase the coral reef maps and geo-referenced data we collected on the Global Reef Expedition. Learn more about Joana and what brought her to the Foundation below.

This Earth Day, Celebrate our Planet’s Blue Heart

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This Earth Day, we invite you to celebrate the blue heart of our planet: our oceans. The oceans produce half the oxygen we breathe, regulate our climate, sequester vast amounts of carbon, and even control the weather. The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation focuses on ocean conservation because we want to protect, preserve, and restore the health of our planet’s blue heart— our living oceans.

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, USA caught fire. Not a boat on the river, or something in the water — the water itself had so much flammable waste dumped into it that it quite literally caught fire, garnering the attention of the entire nation. That same year….

ANNOUNCING 2022 SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS® CHALLENGE SEMI-FINALISTS – AGES 11-14

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Recently, we announced the semi-finalists of the 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge for students participating in the 15-19 year-old category. Today, we are overjoyed to announce the semi-finalists for younger students who are 11-14 years of age.

This international student art contest engages students in important marine science and conservation issues through art. The theme of this year’s challenge is “Ridge to Reef,” and students were asked to illustrate one or more actions that governments, non-profits, park managers, and indigenous communities can take to preserve coral reefs using a ridge to reef approach to conservation. They did not disappoint.

Once again, our judges were put to the test to make some incredibly difficult decisions evaluating the almost 300 pieces of artwork entered in this category. They came to a consensus to include 35 of these entries as semi-finalists. Like with the older semi-finalists group, students used a variety of styles, techniques, and media to portray the theme. Overall, students in this category ranged from 10 different countries.

We would now like to invite you to meet our 11-14 year old semi-finalists:

ANNOUNCING 2022 SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS® CHALLENGE SEMI-FINALISTS – AGES 15-19

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Thank you to all the students who applied to the 2022 Science Without Borders® Challenge! We received some truly incredible and inspiring artwork again for this year’s theme titled “Ridge to Reef.” Students were asked to illustrate one or more actions that governments, non-profits, park managers, and indigenous communities can take to preserve coral reefs using a ridge to reef approach to conservation.

Overall, we received 510 qualifying pieces of artwork from 49 different countries. In the 15–19 year-old category, we received 211 submissions. The themes and styles of artwork varied greatly. Some students took a more realistic approach when illustrating the ridge to reef actions that they would take to conserve coral reefs, while others used symbolism and artistic metaphors to convey their messages.

Our judges chose 34 incredible pieces of artwork in the 15-19 year-old group to become semi-finalists. These artists span 11 countries around the world including some that contain tropical coral reefs, such as Indonesia, Kuwait, and the Philippines; and countries that do not have any such as United Kingdom and New Zealand.

Without further ado, please meet our 15-19 year old semi-finalists:

The Protists Prophets: An Innovative Way to Unlock the Past, Present, and Future of Coral Reefs

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Coral reef ecosystems are rapidly declining due to numerous local and global pressures such as climate change and pollution. In response to the coral reef crisis, the Khaled bin Sultan Living Ocean Foundation (KSLOF) conducted the Global Reef Expedition (GRE) to assess the state of coral reefs in 16 countries around the world. The expedition helped generate extensive data collection including coral reef maps and benthic surveys and 2,500 sediment samples from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. After traveling more than 50,000 km conducting research, the GRE’s valuable data opens the curiosity to explore unconventional approaches to globally evaluate coral reef health.

Now, the Khaled Sultan Living Oceans Foundation and the University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (UM-RSMAS) are working together on a new project called Protist Prophets. Run by Dr. Sam Purkis’s lab at RSMAS and funded by the National Science Foundation, this exciting project uses the sediment samples KSLOF collected on the GRE to evaluate global reef health using benthic foraminifers (forams) as markers of environmental changes and stressors. Our innovative scientific efforts will inform reef conservation strategies and develop non-traditional reef management techniques. Plus, we will assemble the Little Creature with a Big Message educational curriculum using the foram data to complement the foundation’s existing Coral Reef Ecology Curriculum available in the KSLOF Educational Portal.

Foraminifera are windows to understanding long-term coral reef stress

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This guest blog comes from Dr. Alexander Humphreys, a geology lecturer and researcher at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is working with Dr. Humphreys and our partners at UM on a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, “Protists Prophets,” that is looking at benthic sediment samples collected on the Global Reef Expedition (GRE) to assess the state of the coral reef environment over the past 1,000 years.

I am a modern benthic foraminiferal researcher, which means that I study some of the tiniest organisms in the ocean in order to learn about past environmental conditions on coral reefs. However, before we get to this story, let me first explain a bit about these little critters and their importance to science.

Foraminifera, or forams for short, are protists, which are single-celled amoeba-like organisms that grow a protective shell, called a ‘test’. Today there are roughly 4,000 species of forams and they can be found living in all the world’s oceans, from polar environments to the deepest ocean trenches nearly 11 km down. Forams are important to science because they have short lifespans and are sensitive to environmental change. This sensitivity causes rapid shuffling of species abundances over time as the environmental conditions and climates gradually—and sometime abruptly—fluctuate. When the life of a foram comes to an end, the story does not stop there because even though the organism decays, its hard protective test preserves well and fossilizes, laying down evidence of these population changes in the geologic record—one that goes back 500 million years! I approach this deep fossil record of foraminifera like the pages in a book that tells the story of oceanic and environmental change. The trick is learning how to read the story that these little protists have to tell.