The newly mapped reefs of northern and northwestern Australia. Image © AIMS/Eric Lawrey (CC BY4.0).[/caption]
The northern Australian coastline has been mapped in marine charts to alert approaching vessels, but those maps don’t clearly distinguish between rocky and coral reefs, the researchers say. The recent project provides the “first comprehensive view of coral reefs boundaries across northern Australia,” according to the statement from AIMS. This offers “planners, Traditional Owners, and managers a much clearer view of reef and habitat locations."
"Northern Australia is so vast and comparatively understudied, so identifying more than 1,000 previously uncharted reefs highlights that important gaps in our understanding of reef distribution still exist – particularly in more turbid areas where it has traditionally [been] more difficult to ‘see’ these reefs,” Jody Webster, a marine geoscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the research, told Mongabay by email.
The new satellite imagery methodology has also been applied to the Great Barrier Reef in a separate project, now under review, to “identify hundreds of additional reefs and to remove false reefs,” Lawrey said.
Webster said mapping the reefs is the first step, adding that field observations and sampling are now needed “to understand reef ecology, biodiversity, age and development.”
“Significant investment will be needed by the scientific community and agencies to do this important work,” he added.
Banner image: Combining satellite images helped reveal reefs in northern Australia. Image © AIMS/Eric Lawrey (CC BY4.0). 
Founder's Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Researchers have been using sound to study ecosystems for years. A study from ETH Zürich uses it to examine Costa Rica’s payment for ecosystem services program, reports Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor. Giacomo Delgado, a doctoral researcher, compares the method to a physician using a stethoscope. With enough experience, a doctor can distinguish a healthy heartbeat from an irregular one. Forests, he suggests, also produce patterns that can be compared across sites. To test this, Delgado and colleagues deployed recorders across 119 sites on the Nicoya Peninsula in northwestern Costa Rica. They gathered more than 16,000 hours of audio from various types of landscapes: protected forests, areas regenerating under the country’s payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme, monoculture plantations, and active pastures. Costa Rica’s PES program, launched in 1997, compensates landowners for maintaining forest cover and is frequently used as a reference point in conservation policy. Satellite data show that forest cover has recovered after steep declines in the late 20th century. They don’t show whether those forests function as habitats. Counting trees is simpler than assessing species diversity or ecological interactions. Sound offers a different way to assess this. Insects, birds and amphibians produce layered soundscapes that change over the course of a day. Forests with more activity tend to show pronounced peaks at dawn and dusk. Pastures do not. The recordings that Delgado and his team collected suggest that naturally regenerated forests under PES resemble protected forests more closely than degraded land. Plantations show signs of recovery, though less consistently. The method doesn’t resolve all uncertainties. It can’t establish what would have happened without financial incentives. Even so, it provides a more direct measure of ecological condition than canopy cover alone. Delgado’s team is now expanding the analysis across the country. Read the full story Abhishyant Kidangoor here. Banner image of a forest in Costa Rica. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Earth Genome worked with Amazon Conservation and Pulitzer Center to build Amazon Mining Watch.[/caption]
Early applications suggest a wide range of uses. Investigations have mapped illegal gold mining in the Amazon, quarry operations in the Balkans, watersheds in California’s farming heartland, and methane emissions from cattle. Others have used the tool to catalogue industrial livestock facilities or track changes in land use across regions.
Much of the underlying imagery comes from public satellites with moderate resolution and update frequency, making the system less suited to real-time monitoring. Interpretation still depends on user judgment, and false positives remain a risk. The availability of such tools also raises questions about oversight and misuse, even if current data constraints reduce the likelihood of surveillance at a granular level.
Its main impact, for now, is that access extends beyond specialists. By lowering the technical threshold, it extends capabilities once confined to governments and specialists to a wider set of actors: journalists, researchers, advocacy groups, and local communities. Whether it improves environmental outcomes will depend on who uses it, and to what ends.
Disclosure: Mongabay has a partnership with Earth Genome. Earth Genome did not have editorial influence over this piece. 
