NASA builds video game to help save endangered coral reefs

Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California have spent years canvassing the ocean floor using special cameras. The unique lenses on the cameras give a clear view of the ocean floor, including coral and other wildlife with 3D imagery from locations across the world. Now, NASA has to sift through those images and identify everything that’s in them.

Enter NeMO-Net (for Mac and iOS; Android version is still in the works) in which gamers and citizen scientists virtually travel the ocean floor in a vessel called the Nautilus, identifying and classifying whatever coral they come across.

“NeMO-Net leverages the most powerful force on this planet: not a fancy camera or a supercomputer, but people,” said Ames principal investigator, Ved Chirayath. “Anyone can play this game and sort through these data to help us map one of the most beautiful forms of life we know of.”

Players will learn about coral reefs using NASA data while identifying them when they come across these corals during their ‘dives’. They can track their progress, earn badges, and access educational videos about life on the seafloor.

Playing the game will help train the Pleiades supercomputer at Ames to recognize corals from any image of the ocean floor. The more people play NeMO-NET, the smarter the supercomputer’s mapping abilities become, helping NASA to track changes in coral populations, which are considered essential to the marine ecosystem.

Coral reefs provide homes for as many species as a tropical rainforest, but are at risk from rising ocean temperatures, pollution and ocean acidification. Marine systems — and particularly coral reefs — are considered the “medicine cabinets” of the 21st century. Organisms such as sponges, mollusks that call reefs their homes have contributed to medicines used to treat HIV and cancer.