Monitoring Corals from Rescue to Care with ArcGIS and Flickr

Abstract

This article intervenes in disaster media research by investigating the complex system of mediation that is required to mitigate coral disease and to monitor coral rescue and care. Stony coral tissue loss disease, discovered in 2014, has rapidly infected more than 50 percent of the Florida Reef Tract, the only living barrier reef in the continental United States. In response, reef managers have established a coral rescue team tasked with carrying out a phased coral rescue plan. In conjunction with that plan, the Coral Rescue–Coral Monitoring Dashboard interface and a corresponding Coral Rescue photo series hosted on Flickr were launched in 2019. This article explores the Dashboard and the Flickr photo series together as a single form of media introduced and discussed as “intermediation monitoring.” As a dynamic human-animal interface where coral tissue emerges, the Dashboard materializes coral agency and instantiates protocols for care: collection, gene sampling, and preparation for housing and transport to land-based aquarium facilities. The article further demonstrates how complex systems can be connected to one another—Dashboard to photos, technological system to the system of living things, and complex coral systems to human systems—in order to produce the mutually constitutive human-animal relationship between corals and humans as caregivers across the corals’ lives. Also emphasized are the ways that digital animal-human interfaces can be used to enact disaster relief.