Two new complementary international projects — DeepVision and Coral Cartography — will accelerate the mapping of vulnerable marine ecosystems in the deep Atlantic, with a total of around 3 million euros in funding under the Challenger 150 programme, a programme of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development co-led by Ana Hilário, researcher at CESAM/DBio.
CESAM is a partner in both projects, which are led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory. DeepVision received 1.7 million euros (1.995 million USD) from the Bezos Earth Fund to apply artificial intelligence tools to image analysis and speed up the mapping of cold-water coral reefs and sponge grounds, generating evidence for large-scale protection and management; Coral Cartography, funded by CORDAP, has a budget of 1.3 million euros (1.454 million USD) to build the largest atlas of cold-water corals in the Atlantic: standardizing large image datasets, training deep learning models, and producing maps of distribution, density, and diversity.
Together, these projects involve researchers from Portugal, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Germany, Mauritania, Namibia, South Africa, Brazil, and Uruguay. Ana Hilário emphasizes that “international collaboration is essential to understand and protect the deep ocean. No institution can do this alone; it is necessary to join efforts and align goals in order to amplify the impact of research.”
The two projects form an Atlantic platform for applied science that accelerates mapping and provides robust information to support decision-making in the conservation and management of deep-sea ecosystems, establishing CESAM as a reference in this strategic area.