Follow the coral

The team

Dr Terry Done

Terry Done initiated the photographic project in 1980 and is the supervisor of the team. The sites were established and re-visited by his AIMS research teams for over two decades. The study led to the production of several technical papers on coral community dynamics based on time-series data on changes in the sites. However they only scratched the surface of the information contained in the images, which can now be extracted with hands-on work by citizen scientists.

Emre Turak

Emre Turak is a coral reef ecologist and coral taxonomist, who also has an honorary position at the Museum of Tropical Queensland. He did much of the photography for the present project while employed at AIMS throughout the 1990s. In recent years he has partnered with J. Veron in the development of the ‘Corals of the World’ website (https://coral.aims.gov.au/).

Mary Wakeford

Mary Wakeford, now based at AIMS Western Australia campus, was the prime mover in all hands-on aspects of the Great Barrier Reef project in the 1990s, including the underwater photography, management of the images and metadata and some of our publications.

Dr Manuel Gonzalez Rivero

Manuel Gonzalez Rivero's broad research interests cover multidisciplinary approaches to understand drivers of change in coral reefs ecosystems, especially spatial and disturbance ecology, coral reef monitoring and ecosystem-based mathematical modelling. He is currently exploring the use of artificial intelligence to explore local and broad-scale patterns of coral reef change at high-definition (XL Catlin Seaview Survey(https://www.thalabeach.com.au/catlin-seaview-survey/)

Dr Juan Ortiz

Juan Ortiz' research has shown that coral recovery rates across the GBR have declined markedly between 1992 and 2010, with some important coral types exhibiting close to zero recovery by the end of that period. This study will allow him to construct habitat-specific recovery-rate baselines for species and communities, and to acquire estimates of coral's demographic performance during a more benign period, for both single species and multi-species communities.
https://www.aims.gov.au/news-and-media/turning-tables-how-table-corals-are-regenerating-reefs-decades-faster-any-other-coral-type

Dr Eric Lawrey

Eric Lawrey leads the behind the scenes aspects of management of the photo-archive. His broader responsibilities focus on the development of on-line systems that manage environmental research data and its use in modelling and the generation of synthesis reporting products and the creation and management of AIMS eAtlas(https://eatlas.org.au)