Research papers
Can interdisciplinary insights save the Great Barrier Reef?
The twenty-first century has brought climate crisis to the fore. How researchers understand contemporary socio-environmental challenges is shaped by our disciplines. This paper explores how interdisciplinary collaboration can form new understandings of, and communication about, environmental change on the GBR.
Evaluating techniques for mapping island vegetation from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images
We evaluate three approaches to mapping vegetation using images collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to monitor rehabilitation activities in the Five Islands Nature Reserve, Wollongong (Australia).
Mangrove and sand cay dynamics on Australian and Indonesian low wooded islands
Changes to coral reef landscapes are driven by regional processes that are unique to particular localities, yet much of our global knowledge about how landscape changes manifest in coral reef environments is generalised from work undertaken on the Great Barrier Reef. We compare observations of 45 years of change on sand cays and mangroves associated with low wooded islands in Australia and Indonesia.
‘Rock the Boat’: song-writing as geographical practice
This article explores the potential of interdisciplinary collaborative song-writing as research practice. Beginning on a boat on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the research team adopted singing and song-writing as a method for coming together to reflect upon our research aims and motivations, to explore and express the delight and grief we were experiencing in this climate-changing land and seascape and potentially to reach new audiences and create different affects. Our multidisciplinary expertise offered impetus to pursue a hybrid form: an original song written, professionally recorded and vinyl pressed; scholarly notes to expand on our song lyrics; visual presentation of our music as annotated score; and written reflections on the process and its contribution to knowledge. Here, we present and explore the possibilities of song-writing as creative geographical practice.
What Can Artificial Intelligence Offer Coral Reef Managers?
Artificial intelligence is an exciting technological frontier for the coral reef remote sensing community, especially the emergence of machine learning algorithms for mapping and detecting features from aerial images of coral reef environments. Machine learning algorithms are finding exciting uses in environmental remote sensing applications.
Spatial Analysis of Coastal Environments
At the convergence of the land and sea, coastal environments are some of the most dynamic and populated places on Earth. This book explains how the many varied forms of spatial analysis, including mapping, monitoring and modelling, can be applied to a range of coastal environments, such as estuaries, mangroves, seagrass beds and coral reefs.