As our oceans continue to warm and to experience heat waves caused by climate change, it is critically important to understand and continuously update our knowledge on where corals persist. Natural reef ecosystems are the most important and geographically extensive homes for remaining corals, but other places may also harbor corals over the coming decades […]
Asner Lab partners with the State of Hawaii, NOAA, and local communities to drive new science-based decision-making for coral reefs and fisheries. In less than fifty years, Hawaii’s unique and highly endemic coral reefs have undergone alarming losses in coral extent and health as well as in fish populations. The Hawaiian Islands are now in […]
Asner Lab maps numerous countries in the Caribbean for conservation planning and management in partnership with The Nature Conservancy in the Caribbean, Planet, and Vulcan Inc. Our lab has produced high-resolution maps of important shallow underwater habitats throughout the entire Caribbean—including all shallow-water coral reefs. For the first time ever, countries and territories now have […]
CoralSpec, which is short for Coral Spectranomics, is a project to develop a spectral and chemical library of the critical, habitat-forming coral species of our planet. This project aims to visit as many coral reefs as possible to collect field-based spectral measurements and samples for subsequent chemical analyses in our laboratory. This global field program […]
The Global Airborne Observatory (GAO), formerly the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), is an airborne laboratory developed by Dr. Greg Asner and his team that houses advanced Earth mapping technology. The GAO’s mission is to make scientific discoveries, support conservation, and galvanize action to protect the environment at large geographic scales. Now in its third generation, […]