Assessing the health of coral reefs can be a labour-intensive project, undoubtedly leaving many researchers wishing the reefs could just tell us how they were doing.Scientists say that artificial intelligence can be programmed to judge the health of a coral reef simply by listening to a sound recording of the surrounding marine environment.
"Our findings show that a computer can pick up patterns that are undetectable to the human ear. It can tell us faster, and more accurately, how the reef is doing.”, artificial intelligence was 92 per cent accurate at identifying the health of the reefs based on recordings of this underwater song. In this study, University of Exeter scientists trained a computer algorithm to understand what a healthy and unhealthy coral reef sounds like by playing the computer multiple recordings taken around healthy and damaged coral.
The accuracy of the algorithm when looking at the larger grouping of recordings was much higher than attempts to individually identify the health of a specific reef based on any one individual recording, the study found. "One major difficulty is that visual and acoustic surveys of reefs usually rely on labour-intensive methods. Visual surveys are also limited by the fact that many reef creatures conceal themselves, or are active at night, while the complexity of reef sounds has made it difficult to identify reef health using individual recordings.”