---
id: twins/moorea-idea
about:
  depiction: twins/moorea-idea.jpg
  label: Moorea IDEA (Island Digital Ecosystem Avatar)
  description: >-
    A sustainability simulator of the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, led by
    the IDEA Consortium from the University of California's Gump South Pacific
    Research Station; it models links between climate, environment, biodiversity
    and human activity across the island and its lagoon.
  tags:
    - island
    - coral reef
    - social-ecological
    - biodiversity
    - French Polynesia
twin:
  place: 'Moorea and Tetiaroa, French Polynesia'
  scale: island
  operational: research
  homepage: 'https://moorea.berkeley.edu/idea'
open:
  source: unknown
  data: unknown
  api: unknown
  participation: unknown
domains:
  - ecology
  - places
  - people
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: The IDEA Consortium | Gump Station
      url: 'https://moorea.berkeley.edu/idea'
    - title: Island avatars ... Measuring and Modeling | Gump Station
      url: 'https://moorea.berkeley.edu/idea/island-avatars-measuring-and-modeling'
  created: '2026-10-18'
  reviewed: '2026-10-18'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
The Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Consortium set out in 2013 to build "avatars" of two well-studied island ecosystems in French Polynesia, Moorea and the atoll Tetiaroa. The consortium describes an avatar as a sustainability simulator of a social-ecological system: a model of the links and feedbacks between climate, environment, biodiversity and human activities across a coupled marine and terrestrial landscape, drawing on data science, high-performance computing and digital twin technology. The page is hosted by the Gump South Pacific Research Station on Moorea, and the consortium's founding paper is "Simulating Social-Ecological Systems: the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Consortium", GigaScience 2016. The station's director, Neil Davies, is named across the related projects.

The Moorea IDEA is meant to improve prediction of human and natural change on the island at the scales where management and conservation act, and to produce tools other islands can share. Tetiaroa Society launched the Tetiaroa IDEA to support that atoll's Conservation and Sustainable Use Plan; the 4Site Pacific Transect Collaborative extends the approach to Oahu and Palmyra, and the page records interest from Crete and work with island communities in Greece and Sweden. The avatar builds on the Moorea Biocode Project, which inventoried all non-microbial life on the island, and on data-management work (the FAIR Island Project with the California Digital Library, GEOME, iSamples) now gathered under an organisation called iPlaces.

What is open: the pages read say nothing about downloadable model data, published code, an API or how outsiders join, so these are recorded as unknown. The founding paper is linked by DOI.

Status: research; the pages describe the Moorea avatar in the future tense and give no release date. A visualisation from it was shown at a physical-modelling workshop in Zurich.