Google has developed a new AI tool to help marine biologists better understand coral reef ecosystems and their health to inform conservation efforts. Developed in collaboration with Google Research and DeepMind, the tool, SurfPerch, is trained on thousands of hours of coral reef audio recordings and allows reef scientists to “listen to reef health from the inside,” track reef activity at night, and track reefs in deep or murky waters.
The project began by inviting the public to listen to coral reef sounds via the web. Over the past year, visitors to Google's Calling in our Corals website listened to more than 400 hours of coral reef audio from locations around the world and were instructed to click when they heard fish sounds. The result was a “bioacoustic” dataset focused on coral reef health. Crowdsourcing this activity helped Google create a library of new fish sounds and fine-tune its AI tool, SurfPerch, which can now be quickly trained to detect new reef sounds.
Image credit: Google
“This will allow us to analyze new datasets much more efficiently than before, eliminating the need for training on expensive GPU processors, and opening up new opportunities for understanding coral reef communities and their conservation,” said a Google blog post about the project. The post was co-authored by Steve Simpson, professor of marine biology at the University of Bristol, UK, and Ben Williams, a marine biologist at University College London. Both study coral ecosystems, with a focus on areas such as climate change and restoration.
Additionally, the researchers found that they could improve the performance of SurfPerch's models by leveraging bird recordings: Although bird songs and coral reef recordings are very different, they found that bird songs and fish calls share common patterns that the models can learn from.
After combining Calling Our Corals data with SurfPerch in initial trials, researchers were able to uncover differences between protected and unprotected reefs in the Philippines, track restoration outcomes in Indonesia, and better understand relationships with fish communities on the Great Barrier Reef.
Google says the project is ongoing, with new audio being added to the “Calling in Our Corals” website to help further train the AI model.