The Director of Allen Coral Atlas, Dr. Greg Asner, thanks GC in a letter of support:

“January 2025 marked the start of our sixth year since ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science (GDCS) began managing, operating, and financially supporting the Allen Coral Atlas. During this time, our partnership team, which includes members from the University of Queensland, Vulcan, Planet, and the Coral Reef Alliance, rolled out the world’s first high-resolution mapping estimates of coral reef extent and basic composition. These maps have supported hundreds of marine programs, including more than 35 newly established marine protected areas.”

“We also launched and continue to operate the only coral bleaching monitoring system in existence today, providing near real-time access to understanding reef response to repeated marine heatwaves. The Coral Atlas user base has subsequently continued to grow in an effort to assess changes to the world’s coral reefs. Looking back at 2024 alone, we tallied 6,471 users who downloaded 6,959 datasets and operated for thousands of hours on our web platform.”

With such stats, you would think it obvious to keep the Allen Coral Atlas going for a global community of practitioners. Yet doing so takes consistent support of a program that maintains complex satellite data streams and data processing, as well as the delivery of the information to users on our website. Funding such a long-term program takes a multi-organizational approach. We at GDCS continue our commitment to providing the personnel and computing resources needed to maintain and improve the platform, but it takes much more than what we at ASU can provide alone. It takes visionary organizations with a shared purpose to drive a consistent, reliable coral reef observational system, which over time, advances the world’s ability to protect, conserve, and manage reefs with increasing knowledge and fidelity.

This is why I am very pleased to announce that the Allen Coral Atlas will be funded for 2025 by two key organizations: Anthropocene Institute and Global Conservation. The Anthropocene Institute comprises scientists, engineers, communicators, marketers, thought leaders, and advocates—all pulling together toward a common goal: make Earth abundant and sustainable for generations to come. Global Conservation trains, equips, and empowers people globally to advance their protection of wild spaces on land and in the sea. Combined, the Anthropocene Institute and Global Conservation are providing critically needed resources to operate the Allen Coral Atlas this year. From all of us at GDCS, we share a heartfelt thank you for keeping the Allen Coral Atlas online and healthy for our global users.