About
For 4 months EAMT will dive and film different points spanning nearly the entire length of the East African coral reef system using stereo-imaging. EAMT will gather large-scale quantitative data on diversity, abundance and fish body size from South Africa to Somalia.
The data collected will be used in a wide range from education purposes, high schools, universities, through to NGO, and governments and MPA managers. The users are essentially unlimited. The value is in the exposure that is across platforms, from scientific to social media and all in between. Value is in the data that can be used by many different people.
We envision this becoming a globally deployable strategy where each coastline or major coral reef network around the globe can be studied in such a way. A standardized and repeatable survey tool means it can be done year after year if need be.
The cheap low cost contextualized technology ensures smaller national scale surveys can continue adding to the dataset opening up data not only for scientist and academics to use, but communities, divers, and the citizen scientist! The benefits of which will extend beyond the period of data collection, as the imagery will provide a permanent record of the states of these marine communities and ecosystems. In years to come, the same expedition or smaller national data collection strategies can be repeated to then compare the data against the 2012-2013 data.
The software for analyzing the imagery has been created and constantly evolving, to a point where we hope much of the analysis will be automated.
EAMT aims to create a platform for marine-inspired interaction in Africa by linking a generation of change-makers from all walks of life through expeditions, information sharing, imagery and science.
Ultimately, the end beneficiaries are the people that rely on these resources, the 30 million people in coastal East Africa. An entire coastline surveyed in one period is invaluable to build solid conservation strategies.