My name is Kim Yates.
I'm a research oceanographer at the U.S.
Geologic Survey, St Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center.
Pisces stands for processes impacting
sea floor change and ecosystem services and the Pisces project
that we're talking about today is actually our physical Pisces project.
So we're we're working on and talking about physical processes
impacting sea floor change and ecosystem services.
This project, the Pisces project, the physical and biogeochemical piece,
were actually born out of a full career of work.
A bout in 2013, I was actually working in the Florida Keys
and I got into heated discussion with a boat captain
because we wanted to put some chambers on the sea floor.
We were looking for a spot and I jumped in the water
and I was swimming around looking for a spot in the boat.
Captain had promised to come pick me up when I found the spot.
So I found the spot and I waved him down and he wouldn't come get me.
And I was far away from the boat. It was because.
It was because he said the water depth was too shallow.
And I'm like, it's 12 feet deep there.
And he showed me the chart.
He says, No, it's only two feet deep.
It's like, Well, you have to come look at it.
So he got in the water
and swam over with me and sure enough, we were missing ten feet of seafloor
in that particular location according to the nautical charts we were using.
So that's when I made the first discovery that there was
substantial seafloor erosion going on in these carbonate systems
that had been completely undocumented.
We had known for years, in fact, since the 1970s, that coral reefs
were degrading and many of the cause and causes as to why they're degrading.
But people had completely missed the fact
that they were degrading so much that it was affecting
growth of the entire seafloor in these ecosystems.
We have a team of people who developed the what we call geo
reference structure from motion system, which is called Squid five.
Squid five stands for submersible
quantitative underwater imaging device with five cameras.
And what this allowed us to do was to collect very, very, very high resolution
bathymetry or seafloor
elevation data, and also take pictures at the same time.
And essentially what it is, is a floating platform that has five cameras
that are situated at different angles and then also an onboard GPS system.
And when you tow that over the reef,
it takes pictures very rapidly from all five cameras.
And because the positions of those cameras
are slightly different, it can be used to build 3D imagery.
For right now, the keys is the main location for this project.
We have our office in particular has decades of research that have
has been going on in the Keys that help supplement this project by way of,
you know, the geologic history of the coral reefs.
They are well known and we collected a lot of that data.
We have a number of ongoing studies, you know, with respect to ecosystem
processes and carbonate budgets and all sorts of stuff.
And so the data that we're collecting, the Florida Keys actually helps support
many of those projects.
And Dr.
Lorenzen, I'm a research oceanographer at the Saint Petersburg Coast
Marine Science Center, and I study the process of reef growth
over a period from decades to thousands of years.
So this this is a new study that we're starting
that's following up on a study that we just finished up
that was looking at the history of reef growth in the Florida Keys
over the last several decades.
And one of the big findings of that study was that
if these theoretical coral restoration targets are hit,
then reefs could start growing as fast as they did 7000 years ago.
What we're hoping to do with the research where we're doing right
now is to see how that's playing out in reality.
So we're going out to reefs where restoration is actually happening
and we're trying to measure those reef growth processes in real time.
We're going out to these reefs
where we have people who are down
counting fish, folks who are counting sponges, people counting urchins.
And then we're also taking underwater imagery of the reef so we can see what
the corals and the other organisms living on the bottom are doing.
And then we put all that information together into this carbonate budget
that tells us about reef growth. So
divers can go out where we've already collected
squid five data and then they can use our geo reference data
to do what we call geo rectify their diver based imagery.
So that allows them to use our data to apply accurate
positioning to their data, which means they can go back year
after year to that same place and measure change over time on their own.