Five Things About Coral and CORAL
NASA's CORAL campaign will survey reef ecosystems from Hawaii to Australia. Here are a few fast facts about reefs and the way they're studied.
NASA's new COral  Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) field campaign kicks off its data-gathering  phase with an operational readiness test on Oahu, Hawaii, starting the week of June  6. Over the next year, CORAL will conduct airborne and in-water surveys of representative  coral reefs from Hawaii to Australia. By focusing on entire reef ecosystems,  CORAL scientists will get state-of-the-art insights into how biological,  physical and chemical processes shape and affect the ecosystems. These data  will help them answer fundamental questions about how reefs are changing  globally due to the effects of climate change and human activities.1. How does CORAL work?It uses a new NASA airborne instrument  designed specifically to observe coastal environments. The Portable Remote  Imaging SpectroMeter (PRISM) can see objects about five feet by five feet  square (less than two meters by two meters square) from its airborne perch five  miles (eight kilometers) overhead. PRISM will fly in a Gulfstream IV airplane,  collecting large swaths of data that will allow scientists to distinguish among  coral, algae and sand -- important information for assessing reef condition -- without  having to go underwater in each location. This uniform dataset will be an  advance over the current data, collected by multiple groups all using different  techniques.2. Reefs are mostly unknown territory.Search online for "coral reef  images" and you'll get a million spectacular photos, but they all show  just the small fraction of the world's reef area that scuba divers have  visited. The fraction that has been scientifically surveyed is even smaller. We  simply don't have enough data to understand which impacts to reefs are the most  damaging and how resilient reefs are likely to be.3. Scuba diving for science.For decades, scuba diving has been the  gold standard for conducting reef research, allowing scientists to study  everything from coral reproduction to the complex relationships between coral  and other organisms. However, scuba diving as a method of understanding entire  ecosystems leaves a lot to be desired: it is time consuming, labor intensive  and costly. CORAL's use of remote sensing technology to survey entire reef  ecosystems represents a huge step forward in research capacity.4. More than just a pretty face. Hard corals have outlived dinosaurs,  existing on Earth since the mid-Triassic period, 200-250 million years ago.  During this time, they've evolved and diversified to exist across the world's  ocean. Reef building corals typically occupy shallow tropical and subtropical  waters; however, deep-water corals can be found at depths up to 20,000 feet (6,000  meters), and coral reefs were recently discovered at the mouth of the Amazon River  in turbid, muddy water.Coral reef  ecosystems play a vital role in maintaining Earth's marine biodiversity and are  also valuable to humans as a source of food, medical advances and tourism  revenue, with total global ecosystem goods and services estimated at $400  billion each year. This number is especially impressive if you consider that the  U.N. Environment Programme estimates that all the world's reefs would fit into  an area smaller than the state of Arizona.5.Coral or reef?A  single coral polyp -- consisting of the coral animal, its symbiotic algae and  calcium carbonate skeleton -- is usually less than half an inch (one  centimeter) across. Unlike many animals, corals are colonial, which means that  many polyps grow together and form a larger structure. Most corals that you see  in aquaria are, in fact, colonies. A coral reef, on the other hand, is an  entire ecosystem that includes the individual polyps and their colonies, plus  other living (e.g., fish, worms, invertebrates, algae) and nonliving (e.g.,  sunlight, sand, water) components. Scientists have a pretty good understanding  of how individual coral polyps and colonies function, but much less understanding  of how the various parts of a reef act individually and collectively to form an  ecosystem. CORAL is the first opportunity to study reefs at the ecosystem  scale, rather than relying on patchy, inconsistent surveys.NASA  uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home  planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to  observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data  records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with  institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is  changing.For more information about NASA's Earth  science activities, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/earth