The vibrant array of colors and shapes that populate these beautiful underwater ecosystems are what we tend to associate healthy coral reefs with.
They can be noisy. If you have ever snorkeled in a coral reef environment, you will know the distinctive clicking and popping sounds made by various marine creatures under the water, such as snapping shrimp and feeding fish.
The coral reef soundscape has a buzzy din that is almost like a radio static, it could help us to monitor the health of the marine habitats.
Scientists used machine learning to train a program to recognize the acoustic differences between a healthy reef and a degraded coral site.
The team suggests that the new tool could deliver significant advantages compared to other processes for monitoring reef health. Many reef creatures hide or are only seen at night, making it difficult to see.
Ben Williams, a marine biologist from the University of Exeter in the UK, says that a computer can pick up patterns that are invisible to the human ear.
It can tell us more quickly how the reef is doing.
The home of the Mars Coral Reef Restoration project is located in the Spermonde Archipelago, which is located off the southwest coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
Each of the different types of reef habitat contained a different amount of coral cover and generated different types of noise from aquatic creatures.
Previously we relied on manual listening and annotations to make reliable comparisons, according to Williams.
This is a very slow process and the size of marine soundscape databases is increasing given the advent of low-cost recorders.
The team trained a machine learning program to discriminate between different kinds of coral recordings. The tool could identify reef health from audio recordings with 92 percent accuracy.
This is a really exciting development according to co-author and marine biologist Timothy Lamont from Lancaster University in the UK.
It is cheaper and easier to deploy an underwater hydrophone on a reef and leave it there than to have expert divers visit the reef frequently to survey it.
The researchers say that the results are dependent on a number of factors, including the abundance and diversity of fish vocalizations, sounds made by the invertebrates, and even faint noises thought to be made by abiotic sources.
The researchers acknowledge that the method can still be refined further, with greater sound sampling in the future expected to deliver a more nuanced approach to classifying, despite the fact that the human ear might not be able to easily identify such faint and hidden sounds.
The world's corals are quickly running out of time. If we want to save them, we have to act fast.
Ecological Indicators report the findings.
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