Digital Reefs

Digital Reefs is a project hosted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) to build digital twins of coral reefs. The site presents it as public infrastructure: a reef replica that people can view and explore in three dimensions and through time, from a phone, tablet or desktop, and in virtual reality. Partner logos on the page include The Nature Conservancy, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Siemens and WHOI itself.

It is meant for the people who manage, conserve and restore reefs. The project's one-pager lays out the pipeline it has in mind: data gathered by sensors, robots, photogrammetry and ecology, with bathymetry and hydrodynamics; curated in databases and storage; then analysed by machine learning, simulation and forecasting, shown in virtual reality, 3D prints and game engines, and used for management, intervention, emergency response and experimental design. No reef is named.

It runs on cloud computing and game-engine platforms. Whether the software or data are open, and how to get access, is unknown; contact is by email.

Status: a low-fidelity prototype is shown in a video walk-through. The project is funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator programme, and the makers say they expect to scale it within five years into what they call a "globally interconnected Digital Reefs Network". No dates for the prototype or the funding are given.

In this wiki's stack Digital Reefs is an engine and a presentation layer for reef twins; for a reef twin that is already running, see /twins/ereefs/.