Restoration is lauded as fundamental to environmental resilience, yet its advancement is pivotal on the capricious social, political, and economic support of multiple groups. While physical restoration technologies advance, the complementary social scientific study of the discursive and visual practices of restoration logics are underexplored, despite their centrality to mobilizing restoration support. Coasts and reefs are some of social media's most photographed natural environments; these shared images powerfully shape public understanding of their restoration needs. However, images can obscure accurate restoration assessments of these indispensable marine infrastructures. Efforts to review the genre of global restoration narratives and imagery on social media could not be more important for this reason. Are there efforts to visually direct how the land-bound public imagines marine restoration? What visual imagery are coral reef restoration experts relying upon to actively engage these multiple publics of potential supporters?
Harnessing the informative power and global reach of the social media platforms, environmental non-profits use the efficacy of visual imagery to communicate logics of restoration and educate the public on the complex ecological issues surrounding what is at stake for our oceans and marine species. Illuminated and viewed on our electronic devices, these digital photos reveal the often-unseen labor and conditions witnessed during coral restoration practices. With these efforts often conducted at sea in inaccessible and remote locations, the images serve as documentation and examination of the ocean's biodiversity and capture the viewer's attention, through saturated visuals of coral specimens surrounded with aquatic teal seascapes. Bringing these submerged environs to the surface, these images provide visibility, aiming to heighten awareness and generate advocacy and action for the conservation of vital coral ecosystems by generating an empathic response through striking visuals that demonstrate scientific interventions and perspectives to compare and contrast evaluations of imperiled coral specimens and the marine life that depend on coral ecologies for survival.
This article reviews restoration in the context of media and visual analysis literature to spotlight a crucial strand of outreach media that, in tandem with academic literature, significantly shapes the field of coral reef restoration. It demonstrates the ways in which imagery reproduces and challenges restoration rhetoric—evoking specific frames around our collective virtual window to restoration science under the water. This establishes a baseline review of the visual dimensions of coral restoration rhetoric in social media content. Global restoration organizations’ use of visual tropes imbues the public imagination with a common narrative of both restoration and the role of scientist and viewers. The resulting foundational visual techniques not only establish a specific genre, practice, and affective aesthetics, but they also direct the gaze toward images as a crucial index for human–reef interactions—favoring some while rendering others invisible.
The State of Reef Restoration
Coral reefs are declining at an alarming rate, almost entirely out of sight but for the testimony and evidence presented by those interacting with our underwater world. The world's coral reefs produce indispensable ecosystem services to society (cultural heritage, coastline erosion protection, food, income, medicine, tourism, and recreation), immense value to marine life, and are fundamental to many biogeochemical processes. In a world defined by mass-extinction (Kolbert 2014), corals are recognized as one of the most productive ecosystem engineers for their ability to naturally build habitat that supports immense marine biodiversity (Wild et al. 2011). Not only do coral reefs provide many vital ecosystem services including coastal protection and habitat creation, but they are also major drivers for the global tourism industry in part because of their vivid colors and representations of abundance (Uyarra et al. 2009). It is estimated that 30 percent of the reefs around the world contribute to the tourism industry (Spalding et al. 2017), with total value estimates ranging from US$36 billion to trillions of dollars annually worldwide (Constanza et al. 2014; Spalding et al. 2017; UN Environment et al. 2018), which in part financially supports local community livelihoods and reef preservation. However, the lack of visibility and comprehensibility of reef declines makes it extra challenging to educate and garner support for the urgency of action and efforts required to restore them.
Fragmented and Accelerated
Massive efforts have been employed to protect and restore the world's coral reef ecosystems, largely in response to unprecedented reef mortality events in recent decades. Numerous organizations use an array of restoration strategies—such as direct transplantation, coral gardening, micro-fragmentation, larval enhancement, and substratum enhancement (Boström-Einarsson et al. 2020)—to increase coral cover and assist recovery in the face of environmental stressors exacerbating the rapid rate of coral decline. The relatively young field of coral restoration is still rapidly evolving as new and improved techniques continue to emerge. Restoration teams dispersed around the world where reefs are found innovate and apply the methods that work best for their unique environment and available resources. The last decade has seen major breakthroughs such as the ability to induce sexual reproduction, in which corals undergo mass spawning events releasing eggs and gametes into the water column (O'Neil et al. 2021), as well as micro-fragmentation, an asexual reproduction process that has shown great success in rapid growth and high survival rates (Page et al. 2018). Most of these practices are extremely hands-on and time-intensive, requiring individuals to work and conduct monitoring underwater at coral reef sites. Other work conducted on land may include operating laboratories and nurseries.
In this rapidly accelerating field, restoration practitioners, managers, and scientists are often fragmented—by location, methods, and philosophies. While they are urgently working to improve and apply the greatest restoration methods, it is challenging to stay up to date on the state of knowledge (Boström-Einarsson et al. 2020; Roch et al. 2023). This gap has been filled by global networks and transnational initiatives for frequent idea sharing, training, and connectivity. International commitments have also secured support for aquatic ecosystem protection, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the UNEP Coral Reef Breakthrough, both of which have ambitious protection targets by the year 2030. These target programs back a gamut of approaches for combating climate change and tackling biodiversity loss. These differing approaches can create divisions in which restoration is at the center. A consensus exists that action is needed to protect reefs, though some argue that active restoration is an “expensive distraction” from combating the underlying causes of coral decline, while others maintain that is an essential conservation tool (Suggett et al. 2024).
The Bedrock of Public Engagement
Additionally, the support for restoration often depends on funding and advocacy—both public and private—that is driven by the perception of constituents, stakeholders, and everyday people. Yet, many do not fully understand the role nor the signs of a healthy reef system. Engaging the gamut of public diversity remains a challenge because of the wide range of educational, linguistic, and political backgrounds of the general public; however, some tools show promise for their breadth of reach.
Many coral restoration organizations interact with the public through education and outreach campaigns, engaging with either local community members or tourist populations often to generate a feeling of ownership and to maximize the socio-cultural benefits of ecosystem restoration (Hein et al. 2019; Hesley et al. 2017) like revitalizing traditional practices and improving recreational experiences (Kittinger et al. 2016). Engaging tourists is useful for spreading awareness of coral ecosystems and promoting global stewardship (Hein et al. 2019). Participation from citizen scientists and ecotourists can also help lower the cost of restoration expenses (Hesley et al. 2017) while creating a wider network of reef literacy. Appropriate communication is key to extending the benefits of restoration practices beyond those directly involved in the physical process and receiving long-term support (Hein et al. 2021). There are many avenues for communication with the public. Social media is a low resource marketing tool utilized by many non-governmental organizations for engaging stakeholders (Svensson et al. 2015), which is often needed to secure the funding necessary to continue operations (Auger 2014). The use of Twitter became a popular communication approach for reaching wide audiences. As one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world in 2020 and 2021, before its transition to X (Terell 2021). Twitter was a powerful environmental conservation tool for its utility for spreading environmental awareness, piquing government attention (Nunziato 2019), and garnering support from global collations (Bires et al. 2021). It was also a third-space, allowing otherwise formal science communication to dialogue with siloed interdisciplinary experts and rarefied policy-makers in a broader and casual publicly-moderated modern town hall.
Culture on the Vast Horizon: How Human–Reef Relations Are Historically Visually Imagined below Water
The Potential of Public Imagination
Many have never had the privilege of encountering the “fingeryeyes” (Hayward 2010) of cup corals or of exchanging a “waft of current rolling off flapping fins” with a reef for an emotional, life-changing epiphany (Berwald 2022:3). Instead, their impressions of human–coral relationships are mediated by labors of restoration and care by faraway human–technology appendages and by assemblages of transnational networks of glowing screens disseminating restoration imagery. Differing “perceptual attunements” (Jue 2020: 28)—those ways of knowing one another between coral and diver—can also exist with onscreen image viewers who attune to imagined contexts stimulated, and simulated, by the photographer. The imagined experience of these relationships (coral, diver, viewer) likewise shapes restoration. Restoration is squarely in this imaginary space, regulated by the tacit cultural narratives of environmental interaction, that we examine how images “make the dry words retain a trace of the wetness of encounter” (Marks 2002: x in Hayward 2010). Images of coral whet the public imaginary and for many are the only relationship with coral they will ever know.
There is a diversity of community practices related to diving around reefs, but in some regions such encounters have become increasingly inaccessible. Once marked by diversity as historical and traditional coastal community practices, diving encounters in some regions, such as those reliant on diving technologies are under increased regulation, such as in the United States and Caribbean. As access requires more formality (diving gear, licensure) coral encounters have become more inaccessible, resulting in a winnowing of who has the privilege of first-hand experiences. This increases the danger of visual representation becoming univocal or monolithic—representing a less diverse interpretation or coral–human relations. This has affected who sees coral first-hand and for what reason. As encounters became more technology-reliant, the privilege of access has been framed by cultural depictions of masculinized explorers heroically pushing the boundaries of sea science (Ingersoll 2016) and the depictions of high physical risk. Diving training materials specified a tradition of candidates as “fit, young military-trained individuals” (PADI 2020 in Gregory 2023: 716). Yet, broadening participation—in first-hand and in online imagined image dives—can be a mechanism for coral revival.
Broadening Participation
In some regions, coral reefs have historically maintained broad level, diverse engagement. Some regions with robust Indigenous traditions are intentionally re-centering these values as a facet of sustainability (Lam et al. 2020; Loch and Riechers 2021; Prasetyo et al. 2023). This is the case in coral reef hotspots like Indonesia (Glaser et al. 2015), greater Southeast Asia (Savage et al. 2020), and the Pacific (Fabre et al. 2021) and Indian Oceans (Baker and Constant 2020) where livelihoods and cultural services depend on a consistent history of marine accessibility and health. Restoration is challenged by complex valuations of diving as a driving force of international tourism, which simultaneously degrades the reefs and provides conservation funding (Emang et al. 2020). This raises the question of how to create an engaged public beyond the global tourist diving industry.
Broadening first-hand encounters with coral has been examined as a potential conservation mechanism. These environmental justice paths to conservation demonstrate the merits of including economically disadvantaged stakeholders (Augustine et al. 2016), of restoring intangible cultural services which have been destabilized over centuries of anticolonial access (Gould et al. 2022), and of leveraging tourist participation which was previously stymied by exclusionary assumptions about age, gender, and physical impairment (Gregory 2023). Broadening inclusion is also a crucial component in inclusive polycentric resource governance regimes (Ostrom 2009) and community-based self-administered governance in marine area management (Adhuri 2009). Reflexivity about divers’ intersectional roles (even professional roles like scientist, conservationist, economic agent) can increase potential restoration stakeholders’ sense of agency through an “aesthetic of resilience” that builds hope in the Anthropocene (Meyers 2017). As the field moves toward mainstreaming restoration stakeholders’ recognition of diversity and intersectional roles (both limited and privileged, the latter in Black and Stone 2005), the visual record must be interrogated for the degree to which it is exclusionary. It is important to document who is producing the visual record that will inspire and drive the future pipeline of divers, funders, and advocates—how and to what end?
The Streamlining Effects of Science
Scientific documentation techniques are one of the lenses of historic exclusion; before social media, the visual tools of capturing and disseminating images—and their framing arguments—had long been tied to socioeconomic privilege of individuals and institutions. Scientific documentation techniques continue to rely on a growing array of image technologies to provide conclusive knowledge about coral reefs: photogrammetry uses images to create dimensional measurements and transects use images as a form of monitoring marine life. They are intentional and require documentation tools, if not monitoring infrastructures largely accessible only to the scientific community and restoration organizations. Scientific image analysis is prohibitive because of the cost of equipment, precision of data collection, and intricacy and time required for analysis (Bruno et al. 2011). Newer, purportedly more accessible techniques for photogrammetry integrate with geospatial software (Burns et al. 2015) and remote sensing tools like LIDAR (Casella et al. 2017), but the “quick and easy” version still requires repeat dive access, a high-quality/high-resolution camera, photo-processing software and 3D modeling software (Lange and Perry 2020). Likewise, transect accuracy and costs have been estimated for community adoption for six common techniques, ranging from US$45 to $6,000 for equipment, noting that salaries and field-costs can still make surveying sites prohibitive (Leujak and Ormond 2007). Ultimately, this means two things. First, coral image traditions are accepted as scientific tools to convey coral reef health. Second, coral image traditions are rooted as a scientific genre, which is not objective (Best and Kellner 2020), rather, the genre is a cultural artifact that must be explicitly examined vis-à-vis the cultural traditions that shape its visual assumptions (and the cultural traditions absent from the visual narrative).
These visual narratives, and the public imaginations that rely on them, thrive on the circulation of imagery. When these images repeat visual themes, they make tacit arguments that become engrained assumptions. Simon Foale and Martha Macintyre describe these visual themes within the very beginning of natural history: from the ways artists’ sketches of exotic species entangle with pre-Darwinian sciences (Smith 1959); to the photographic rendering of nature photography capturing the “nostalgic” glimpses of life as it falls apart (Sontag 2001); and to their own evidence that natural images circulate with unsubstantiated scientific narratives as another tool of “authority and moral justification for transnational actors . . . to perpetuate dominance” (Foale and Macintyre 2005:12). Their argument of tacit visual themes substantiating cultural values of scientific eras shows restoration images are a “virtual reality of a specific contemporary vision,” one that produces images that rely on culturally derived constrictions and inspirations (ibid.). These cultural values can be even more evident in the varied visual depictions of coastal restoration across species.
Marine Restoration Images
Across aquatic landscapes, coastal, and marine ecosystem services are showing greater interest in the dimensions of imagery. Although similarly as vital as coral reefs as a cradle of marine life, seagrass meadows have escaped thorough analysis in the literature. This is more surprising when the literature covering meadows and lawns on land is rife with visual analysis (Lang 2018). Yet seagrass is treated as a banal backdrop in the comparatively thin image analysis literature. One study notably uses the spatial-visual dimensions of ancient maps to ground-truth and legitimize community knowledge, implicitly recognizing the potential inaccuracies of historical seagrass in visual representation (Leriche et al. 2004). Seagrass studies are advanced in using visual “semantics” for training automatized detection on maps (Rende et al. 2020; Weidmann et al. 2019). Yet while studies have used social media images to map seagrass through deep learning (Cardoso et al. 2024), their social uses and insights are largely relegated to recruiting people to seagrass studies (e.g., Elggren 2019; Losciale et al. 2022). The literature grossly understudies the public imaginary of seagrass, its roles, labor, and restoration.
More readily analyzed in the literature, mangroves stand at the liminal edge of forest restoration and aquatic flora restoration. Mangrove images, like coral images, are demonstrated to be multilayered and at times fraught in conservation in the Global South (Saunders 2013). These images are complicated by similar historic and anticolonial depictions of waterscapes (ibid.) and as an inherent visual dimension of identity construction (Brück 2007), but in contrast mangrove images seem also subject to more of the “landscape” tropes such as taming the wildness (Wolmer 2005) and pressure to be industrially productive and practical beyond “pleasurable contemplation” (Saunders 2013). Additionally, and in part a contemporary manifestation of these politics, in mangrove restoration literature, there are competing politics and strategies (e.g., flagship species paradigm versus ecosystems services paradigm) in the selection of an iconic species used to raise awareness and funding (Thompson and Rog 2019). Mangrove images are a part of a suite of information being harvested from social media to evaluate the spatiotemporal distribution of cultural services (Wang et al. 2023), their nature-based solutions (Xuezhu and Lange 2020), and assessments of ecological benefits (Richards and Friess 2015). As these images begin to bring marine restoration into a visual bidirectional dialogue with community members, it is crucial to be cognizant of the remaining hurdles to accessibility and equity. Namely, who gets to make the images, who has access, and who or what is included—or excluded—in the frame?
Media as Exacerbating Identity Gaps
Although witnessing first-hand and online images of coral is more accessible than ever before, it remains disparate and the visual representation of coral is still characterized by “unevenness” (West 2016: 1), which is buoyed by an artistic lineage tied to colonialism and reified in the simplest images of life on coastal reefs (Thompson 2006). Moreover, it is argued that visual tools like underwater photography and filmmaking—whose pioneers intentionally built stories of intrepid heroic explorations of a dangerous frontier—were media promoting racial discrimination and a persistent extractive ethos that ushered in widespread dispossession and environmental crisis (Elias 2019). As the landlocked world public relied on their images of coral reefs, specific tropes and stories were built into cultural narrative traditions. This affective engagement continues with images pointing to the value of restoration, and its roots in a problematic visual construction of conservation that hinges on tacit systems of identity politics that cannot go unexamined.
The visual nature of restoration images allows people to effectively plunge deeper into reefs. Modern coral restoration images are not simply representing coral reefs, rather, images are artifacts in a system of related subjects encompassing coral, divers, viewers, and conceptions of science and restoration, to extend Heidegger's ontology (1977). How viewers picture themselves in this system—subject or otherwise—is important. Agency can be claimed in the practice of directing the aesthetic dimensions of ecological design (Meyers 2017), through creating narratives of conservation (ibid.), or by using photograph series as ecocinematic prompts to an “alternative spectatorship of awareness” (James 2020). Solutions are also perceived through cinematic effects like time-lapse and slow-motion (in documentaries and democratized video postings made possible through technologies like personal handheld cameras), which can convey the lived experience of witnessing at different paces, capturing both slow and rapid climate effects like coral bleaching (Batalla 2022).
Smartphones are the latest in a visual cultural history of marine optical devices which began in the 1880s to immerse in the “marvels of the magical world below” (Thompson 2006: 163–166). Moore describes the “highly visual” media of coral restoration that circulate on and offline as “aspirational witnessing tools” that convey both the sense of decline and an “univocal” narrative of restoration efforts as solutions rendered as “smooth, technologically confident, normative progress narrative[s]” (Moore 2021: 462). Augmented reality and enhanced visualizations like 360° videos offering reef immersion are deliberately used as empathy generating tools, as witnessed at the International Coral Reef Science Conference and in outreach (Braverman 2018; Jue 2022). Yet these images hold the power to erase the truths about decline and restoration as messy and sometimes unsuccessful processes. Moore confronts the images’ “overwhelming affective power” as a witnessing tool for coral restoration—at times more compelling than scientific evidence—and suggests this supports monolithic restoration narratives that may detract from more reliable health indices (Raffles 2002 in Moore 2021: 464). Documenting the ways that everyday people and stakeholders join, reclaim, challenge, and affirm this visual cultural dialogue through their online communication can indicate areas to broaden participation in restoring coralscapes while dismantling problematic visual histories.
Online Restoration Communication
This review article chronicles the emerging visual technologies and strategies of visualization in nature restoration with a focus on social media imagery of coral reefs. A large part of this is anchored in the shift of information acquisition and affective argumentation to online platforms that position everyday people in conversation with restoration organizations.
Top Marine Information Resource
Social media is a growing source of public information and imagination about restoration and identity; as such, it must be examined for the ways it shapes participation in restoration, both professionally and informally. A socioeconomic study conducted by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (Allen et al. 2019) analyzed data concerning the public's knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes about coral reef ecosystems. Among the findings was a summary of the different sources that residents of Monroe County, Florida, obtained coral reef information, with 32.9 percent from nonprofit organizations and 31.1 percent from social media. Almost one third of participants in the study by the team (Allen et al. 2021) shared that they receive their information about coral reef ecosystems from nonprofit organizations and social media, and so the messaging and content of Facebook and Twitter posts may be significant in shaping public perception. In a case study concerning protection of the Zayandeh-Rood River Environment (Isfahan, Iran), social media was found to be impactful to the attitude and behavior of the public (Roshandel et al. 2016). The results underscore the impactful opportunities social media offers for stimulating environmental activism. Despite such opportunities, the ways in which coral restoration is communicated—explicitly, implicitly, and visually—on social media platforms has yet to be deeply explored.
The Affective Values Transmitted by Restoration Images
Social media has already demonstrated both affective potential and pitfall. A study by Liam Heneghan and Oisin Heneghan (2017) that assessed a sample of two thousand posts on the topic of ecological restoration found that while there was fairly mature engagement about the specific topic of invasive species, discussion explicitly about restoration remained primarily in the technical field. Content pertaining to restoration was far outnumbered by the outcry about the fate of polar bears. Polar bear posts were often characterized by emotional language, specifically referencing crying or weeping, a theme that was not apparent in the sample of posts about ecological restoration. These “charismatic macro-faunal” creatures have captured the public's attention on social media, giving indication that perhaps other threatened species, like corals, produce affective responses. Environmental action is closely tied to emotional identification (Milton 2002), so affective images of anthropomorphism or highlighting coral's agency would be arguably the most compelling. Coral reefs are part of the most globally diverse yet underappreciated taxon of organisms, where “the wealth of coral reef biodiversity lies in ‘other’ small, cryptic invertebrates” (Mikkelsen and Cracraft 2001) and as such their charismatic and affective possibilities are limited by their inscrutability. Not only are the “heroes” of reefs hard to visualize, but the “villains” of reefs are not always charismatic macro-faunal “bad guys” or processes, rather they are similarly amorphous or invisiblized. This brings another challenging layer of visual narrative representation of both coral and its decline: its storyline cannot rely on charismatic characters. Thus, for arthropods and cryptic invisibilia like coral, restoration narratives depend even more on stylistic depiction choices, the underlying narratives, and likely the photographic imagery that form the genre.
This calls to question the degree to which environmental restoration professionals are using social media to shape the visual and affective narratives of their work. Content analysis conducted in previous studies to assess the social media posts of environmental nonprofits suggest that communication is mostly one-way (Kim et al. 2014; Lovejoy et al. 2012; Svensson et al. 2015) and thus the full potential of social media, to strategically engage in bidirectional dialogue with multiple publics to simultaneously build support for restoration and actively collaborate with the public as everyday experts with the capacity to positively transform restoration science, is not being reached. These studies focused on rhetorical principles (Auger 2014) and communication strategies (Lovejoy and Saxton 2012; Svensson et al. 2015) conveyed by nonprofits over text and are only recently beginning to investigate the messages conveyed through imagery shared on social media platforms (Furtado et al. 2023). In each study, researchers performed content analysis to code tweets into categories, revealing the prevailing strategies employed to connect with public audiences. They demonstrate the degree to which rhetoric from restoration organizations differs and how the genre is being shaped in social media conversations, yet they do not analyze the visual narratives that compel people to click, linger, learn and share.
Images as Proxy for Cultural Ecosystem Services
Images of nature on social media have been studied to assess the value of cultural ecosystem services. These include the cultural benefits that ecosystems provide in human-nature interactions (Cardoso et al. 2022) and things like aesthetic value (Figueroa-Alfaro and Tang 2017) in different natural areas around the world. Terrestrial environments have been the focus of many studies, posing an opportunity to extend exploration of social media imagery techniques to marine environments. Most studies used the social media platform, Flickr (Cardoso et al. 2022; Hale et al. 2019; Pickering et al. 2020; Rossi et al. 2020; Schirpke et al. 2021), which is popular for sharing high-quality photographs. Through spatial analysis of the density of geotagged nature photos, some have identified natural features and attractions that may have considerable cultural value from the perspective of visitors (Figueroa and Tang 2017; Schirpke et al. 2021), information that is informative for management and tourism purposes. For instance, Uta Schirpke and colleagues (2021) correlated the spatial and temporal density of photos near a lake with elevation, land cover, lake type, and accessibility, to infer saliency. Similarly, Richar Wagner Figueroa-Alfaro and Zhenhong Tang (2017) identified areas of high aesthetic value in Nebraska by mapping images posted on Flickr and Panoramio in ArcGIS, determining landmarks of high density. Similar attempts to identify cultural ecosystem services through Twitter text content analysis have assessed people's emotions when tweeting about natural environments (Auger 2014; Kim et al. 2014; Lovejoy et al. 2012; Lovejoy and Saxton 2012; Roberts et al. 2019). Sentiment analysis has revealed the emotions that green spaces in urban areas elicit in people, finding positive emotions to be dominant over negative ones (Roberts et al. 2019). These cultural values (spatial, aesthetic, sentimental) are crucial to motivating public support; the images that tell this story are affected by the cultural dimensions of the scientists and organizations that promulgate them.
The Visual Potential for Restoration Organizations
The literature builds the case of a potentially dangerous feedback loop in restoration imagery—over-representing some visual tropes while cropping out entire cultural subjectivities, identities, and epistemologies of environments and restoration. Some of the literature analyzes how selective images of reefs shape cultural traditions and subjectivities; other literature focuses instead on how images select and enhance some tropes while omitting other tropes to confirm the way people think about reefs. These cultural dimensions both impact and are impacted by images in a feedback loop spiraling into a tightly bound picture of coral restoration. Yet it would be remiss to describe this process as driven by one force alone.
Rectifying Perspectives
To understand the power of images in framing restoration, it is not as simple as labeling scientific traditions as exclusionary and social media as inclusive. Rather, both face their own problematics of representation and together they may magnify them. Only comparative studies can establish the effects of these forces. As described earlier, scientific experts and everyday people must be in conversation to generate the public support necessary for successful restoration projects. The literature focuses on the growing voice of everyday people in visually portraying coral reefs and their restoration online. This makes sense due to the sheer volume of visual data tourists, recreational users, and everyday people posting to social media. Tourist images of coral reefs are the most numerous yet are arguably a genre of their own as their motivations are not singularly committed to raising awareness and support for restoration. While there is much information to glean from the perspective of the tourist (particularly in those regions with high inaccessibility where tourist imagery online is a monolithic voice due to the inaccessibility of reefs), there is a gap in the literature on the visual strategies employed by restoration organizations on social media platforms to reach and evoke the public.
While on the surface, this may seem innocuous, it puts restoration as a field into jeopardy. Restoration organizations, though their imagery is in some regions comparatively drowned by tourist imagery, have the opportunity to reclaim and reframe restoration imagery to more effectively protect the environment and to broaden the participation of multiple publics. To foment lasting support, it is in the organizations’ vested interest to build multiple diverse publics and a broader labor pipeline. Restoration organizations are run ultimately by workers whose identities as individual users are often de-emphasized in favor of representing the voice of the organization. The workers’ labor is not immune from being shaped by many cultural factors in the occupation: the view of reefs as restoration objects, the mandate to garner public support and funding, the commitment to document and justify costly scientific methods, the necessity to demonstrate results. However, the workers’ individual cultural identities can shape their approaches to posting as the voice of organizations, which has the potential to shed some of the historical problematics of colonial and monolithic portrayals of restoration imagery.
Restoration Organizations’ Imagery is Understudied
A systematic review of the literature indicates that organizations’ images are not only understudied but also point toward a genre of restoration that could fruitfully be examined for its implications on the global narrative on coral restoration authority. Few studies have evaluated nonprofit organizations’ visual social media content, as shown in Table 1. As part of a more comprehensive assessment, Jeanine Guidry and colleagues (2017) compared the quantity of Twitter and Instagram posts with visuals between public health organizations’ coverage of infectious disease outbreaks, determining that visual content is beneficial for conveying information in risk-based communication. Chao Guo and Gregory Saxton (2018) also considered visuals as one of many variables in an assessment of what tweet characteristics by nonprofit advocacy organizations increased the amount of attention it received, measured by quantity of retweets or favorites. Neither of these studies assess the content of the visuals themselves, nor do they assess environmental restoration.
Evaluations of Visual Dimensions of Environmental Social Media Content—sorted by producer of content and the content medium.
| Tourists/People | Organizations | |
|---|---|---|
| Discourse, text, words | ||
| Visual dimensions |
Guo and Saxton 2018 (limited) Guidry et al. 2017 (limited) |
Potential Ways to Address the Gap in Literature
This review suggests the benefits of future literature in undertaking a deep visual analysis, or close reading, of a limited number of still images in order to establish and test tropes for reef restoration visual narratives. To limit cultural bias, studies might select global-facing reef restoration organizations from diverse marine, geographic and cultural areas. Future research should seek organizations for wide geographic representation and restoration techniques employed. Analyses could include an in-depth focus on a singular social media platform, a visual format (e.g., video, livestream, time-lapse, slow-motion), or a comparison across multiple social media platforms to reveal additional trends.
The results from this new direction in research could provide insight into communication techniques in coastal socio-ecological systems which could be compared across offline print media (e.g., donor reports, pamphlets, event advertisements, and recruitment flyers), official oral communications (e.g., speeches, presentations), and historically professionally-dominated video genres (e.g., commercials, documentaries). The image analysis and conclusions could be applied beyond social media platforms to annual sustainability reports and to science journalism to further examine the images not only as aesthetic objects, but as socio-political artifacts visually signaling to a different imagined audience and to different ends. This would add breadth to the genre across multiple formats.
To humanize and add temporal depth on the decision making and agentive limitations and processes, future research should be complemented by ethnographic research exploring the dimensions of developing, regulating, and altering organizations’ communication techniques. For instance, in-depth interviews with social media account managers in restoration organizations would yield an understanding of how internal pressures, logics, and structures make narrative and genre choices flexible or ossified.
Future applied studies can use this review article as a springboard to investigate the relationship between perception and values of viewers on social media with corresponding action and behavior. This could be evaluated at the individual level (e.g., personal awareness, donorship, involvement in citizen-science, advocacy) but also the political-economic dimensions at local, regional and global scales (e.g., investigating what defines social media posts that “triggered” governmental policies about restoration and to what degree does social media imagery choices affect this).
Further, future studies focusing on broader sites of restoration could productively compare the theoretical framework and analytical methods to other sites. Mangroves would provide another perspective on cradles of marine life but would contrast in their comparative accessibility. Likewise, seagrass—a lacuna in public social media images—could provide a different perspective of a macro flora whose imagery has not yet captured public imagination. Similarly, a study on forest restoration would provide fertile ground for a land-based site with wide restoration publicity.
Discussion and Implications
Our analysis of the literature contributes to understanding the ways researchers are exploring the connections between people and their environment, and understanding how perceptions of ecosystem decline are shaped, as well as what may motivate action or behavior change. Restoration is necessary to rebuilding and protecting marine environment hotspots like coral reefs. This requires the social, political, and economic support of multiple groups of stakeholders and decision makers—many of whom are engaged by evocative images of science from below the water. Images of restoration grow in power when they represent inaccessible sites, as in many of the world's coral reefs, because they are the primary if not only visual source of restoration labor, how it is framed and what it entails. The importance of scrutinizing these images through visual analysis, thematic assessment, and genre identification cannot be understated. The images are at the heart of mobilizing restoration support and because this visual record builds on past and present cultural tropes, the images also visually delineate who performs scientific restoration, under what conditions and processes, and to what end. Whether explicitly or implicitly, shared images of reef restoration powerfully shape public understanding of restoration needs and the labor it requires. Understanding the common visual tropes of the genre is the first step toward understanding the cultural construction that directs public imagination of reefs as restoration objects.
Our review examines the gaps in studying the genre of visual communication techniques that leading global coral restoration organizations employ to define the genre of restoration narrative. Harnessing the informative power and global reach of social media, environmental non-profits communicate logics of restoration to educate the public on the complex ecological issues surrounding what is at stake for our oceans and marine species—precisely by directing the gaze. Illuminated and viewed on our electronic devices, these digital photos reveal the often-unseen labor and conditions witnessed during coral restoration practices. Bringing these otherwise invisible worlds within our witnessing gaze, these images provide visibility to both restoration labor and to the epistemic practice of restoration logics. These visual expectations of restoration's labor and logics can spill over into the way people see their role in supporting specific types of restoration interventions, or the ways they despair and hope for a different future with reefs and with the greater world. Gaining public support for just, accurate, and even un-picturesque restoration could not be more important.
Acknowledgments
Partial support for this article was provided by a State of Florida Protect our Reefs Grant administered by Mote Marine Laboratory.
References
Adhuri, Dedi S. 2009. “Social Identity and Access to Natural Resources: Ethnicity and Regionalism from a Maritime Perspective.” In The Politics of the Periphery in Indonesia: Social and Geographical Perspectives, ed. Minako Sakai, Glenn Banks, and J. H. Walker, 134–152. Singapore: NUS Press.
Allen, Mary E., Chloe S. Fleming, Ben M. Zito, Sarah B. Gonyo, Seann D. Regan, and Erica K. Towle. 2021. National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Socioeconomic Monitoring Component: Summary Findings for South Florida, 2019. Report to NOAA Technical Memorandum CRCP; 39.
Allen, Mary E., Chloe S. Fleming, Sarah B. Gonyo, Erica K. Towle, Maria K. Dillard, Arielle Levine, Matt Gorstein, Jarrod Loerzel, Seann D. Regan, Ben M. Zito, and Peter E.T. Edwards. 2021. “Resident perceptions of ecosystem services provided by US coral reefs: highlights from the first cycle of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program's Socioeconomic Survey.” Water 13 (15): 2081. https://doi.org/10.3390/w13152081.
Auger, Giselle Andree. 2014. “Rhetorical Framing: Examining the Message Structure of Nonprofit Organizations on Twitter.” International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 19 (4): 239–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.1499
Augustine, Skye, Phillip Dearden, and Rick Rollins. 2016. “Are changing diver characteristics important for coral reef conservation?.” Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 26 (4): 660–673. https://doi.org/10.1002/aqc.2574.
Baker, Susan, and Natasha Louise Constant. 2020. “Epistemic justice and the integration of local ecological knowledge for marine conservation: Lessons from the Seychelles.” Marine Policy 117: 103921. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2020.103921.
Batalla, Oriol. 2022. “Extinction temporalities: Rethinking TimeSpaces, knots of life and the sixth extinction in the necrocene.” Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research 6: 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v3i2.40221.
Berwald, Julie. 2022. Life on the rocks: Building a future for coral reefs. Riverhead books: Penguin.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. (2001) 2020. The postmodern adventure: Science technology and cultural studies at the third millennium. Routledge.
Bires, Zemenu, and Sahil Raj. 2021. “Social Media as a Pathway to Environmental Conservation in Protected Areas: A Case Study on Lake Tana Biosphere Reserve.” Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 11 (4): 457–70. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCHMSD-10-2019-0134
Black, Linda L., and David Stone. 2005. “Expanding the definition of privilege: The concept of social privilege.” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 33, no. 4 (2005): 243–255. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2005.tb00020.x.
Boström-Einarsson, Lisa, Russell C. Babcock, Elisa Bayraktarov, Daniela Ceccarelli, Nathan Cook, Sebastian C. A. Ferse, Boze Hancock, et al. 2020. “Coral Restoration – A Systematic Review of Current Methods, Successes, Failures and Future Directions.” PLOS ONE 15 (1): e0226631. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226631.
Braverman, Irus. 2018. Coral whisperers: Scientists on the brink. Vol. 3. Univ of California Press.
Brück, Joanna. 2007. “Landscape politics and colonial identities: Sir Richard Colt Hoare's tour of Ireland, 1806.” Journal of Social Archaeology 7 (2): 224–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605307077482
Bruno, Fabio, Gianfranco Bianco, Maurizio Muzzupappa, Sandro Barone, and Armando Viviano Razionale. 2011. “Experimentation of structured light and stereo vision for underwater 3D reconstruction.” ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 66 (4): 508–518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2011.02.009
Burns, J.H.R., D. Delparte, R.D.Gates, and M. Takabayashi. 2015. “Integrating structure-from-motion photogrammetry with geospatial software as a novel technique for quantifying 3D ecological characteristics of coral reefs.” PeerJ 3: e1077. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1077.
Cardoso, Ana Sofia, Francesco Renna, Ricardo Moreno-Llorca, Domingo Alcaraz-Segura, Siham Tabik, Richard J. Ladle, and Ana Sofia Vaz. 2022. “Classifying the Content of Social Media Images to Support Cultural Ecosystem Service Assessments Using Deep Learning Models.” Ecosystem Services 54 (April): 101410. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2022.101410.
Cardoso, Ana Sofia, Eva Malta-Pinto, Sahim Tabik, Tom August, Helen E. Roy, Ricardo Correia, Joana R. Vicente,and Ana Sofia Vaz. 2024. “Can citizen science and social media images support the detection of new invasion sites? A deep learning test case with Cortaderia selloana.” Ecological Informatics 81: 102602. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2024.102602.
Casella, Elisa, Antoine Collin, Daniel Harris, Sebastian Ferse, Sonia Bejarano, Valeriano Parravicini, James L. Hench, and Alessio Rovere. 2017. “Mapping coral reefs using consumer-grade drones and structure from motion photogrammetry techniques.” Coral Reefs 36: 269–275. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-016-1522-0.
Cheng, Yingyi, Jinguang Zhang, Wei Wei, and Bing Zhao. 2021. “Effects of Urban Parks on Residents’ Expressed Happiness before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Landscape and Urban Planning 212 (August): 104118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2021.104118.
Costanza, Robert, Rudolf De Groot, Paul Sutton, Sander Van der Ploeg, Sharolyn J. Anderson, Ida Kubiszewski, Stephen Farber, and R. Kerry Turner. 2014. “Changes in the global value of ecosystem services.” Global environmental change 26: 152–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.002.
Elggren, Sofie. 2019. “People's perception of seagrass ecosystems-a Step Zero analysis in establishing marine protection of seagrass around Gotland, Sweden.” M.A. thesis, Uppsala University.
Elias, Ann. 2019. Coral empire: Underwater oceans, colonial tropics, visual modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Emang, Diana, Thomas Hedemark Lundhede, and Bo Jellesmark Thorsen. 2020. “The role of divers’ experience for their valuation of diving site conservation: The case of Sipadan, Borneo.” Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism 32: 100237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jort.2019.100237.
Fabre, Pauline, Tamatoa Bambridge, Joachim Claudet, Eleanor Sterling, and Alexander Mawyer. 2021. “Contemporary Rāhui: placing Indigenous, conservation, and sustainability sciences in community-led conservation.” Pacific Conservation Biology 27 (4): 451–463. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC20087
Figueroa-Alfaro, Richard Wagner, and Zhenghong Tang. 2017. “Evaluating the Aesthetic Value of Cultural Ecosystem Services by Mapping Geo-Tagged Photographs from Social Media Data on Panoramio and Flickr.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 60 (2): 266–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2016.1151772
Foale, Simon and Martha Macintyre. 2005. “Green Fantasies: Photographic representations of biodiversity and ecotourism in the Western Pacific.” Journal of Political Ecology 12 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2458/v12i1.21671
Furtado, Daniel P., Edson A. Vieira, Wildna Fernandes Nascimento, Kelly Y. Inagaki, Jessica Bleuel, Marco Antonio Zanata Alves, Guilherme O. Longo, Luiz S. Oliveira. 2023. “#DeOlhoNosCorais: a polygonal annotated dataset to optimize coral monitoring.” PeerJ 11: e16219. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16219.
Glaser, Marion, Annette Breckwoldt, Rio Deswandi, Irendra Radjawali, Wasistini Baitoningsih, and Sebastian CA Ferse. 2015. “Of exploited reefs and fishers–A holistic view on participatory coastal and marine management in an Indonesian archipelago.” Ocean & Coastal Management 116: 193–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2015.07.022.
Gould, Rachelle K., Cheryl E. Morse, Jill Brooks, and Alison Adams. 2022. “‘SO MUCH FOR ACCESS:’ DIFFERENCE, BENEFITS, AND BARRIERS AT HAWAII'S SHORELINES.” Geographical Review 112 (4): 532–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/00167428.2020.1812069
Gregory, Sally F. 2023. “Diving with dignity? Older women scuba divers, constraints and accessible tourism on the great barrier reef.” Annals of Leisure Research 26 (5): 716–736. https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2022.2041449
Guidry, Jeanine P. D., Yan Jin, Caroline A. Orr, Marcus Messner, and Shana Meganck. 2017. “Ebola on Instagram and Twitter: How Health Organizations Address the Health Crisis in Their Social Media Engagement.” Public Relations Review 43 (3): 477–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2017.04.009
Guo, Chao, and Gregory D. Saxton. 2018. “Speaking and Being Heard: How Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations Gain Attention on Social Media.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 47 (1): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764017713724
Hale, Rebecca L., Elizabeth M. Cook, and Bray J. Betran. 2019. “Cultural ecosystem services provided by rivers across diverse social-ecological landscapes: A social media analysis.” Ecological Indicators 107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.105580.
Hayward, Eva. 2010. “Fingeryeyes: impressions of cup corals.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 577–599. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01070.x
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The age of the world picture.” In Science and the Quest for Reality, ed. Alfred I. Tauber, 70–88. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Hein, Margaux Y., Alastair Birtles, Bette L. Willis, Naomi Gardiner, Roger Beeden, and Nadine A. Marshall. 2019. “Coral Restoration: Socio-Ecological Perspectives of Benefits and Limitations.” Biological Conservation 229 (January): 14–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.11.014.
Hein, Margaux Y., Tali Vardi, Elizabeth C. Shaver, Sylvain Pioch, Lisa Boström-Einarsson, Mohamed Ahmed, Gabriel Grimsditch, and Ian M. McLeod. 2021. “Perspectives on the Use of Coral Reef Restoration as a Strategy to Support and Improve Reef Ecosystem Services.” Frontiers in Marine Science 8. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.618303.
Heneghan, Liam, and Oisín Heneghan. 2017. “Fewer Than 140 Characters. Restorationists’ use of social media,” in Routledge Handbook of Ecological and Environmental Restoration, ed. Allison Stuart and Stephen Murphy, 565–579. London: Routledge.
Hesley, Dalton, D. Burdeno, Crawford Drury, S. Schopmeyer, and Diego Lirman. 2017. “Citizen science benefits coral reef restoration activities.” Journal for Nature Conservation 40: 94–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnc.2017.09.001.
Ingersoll, Karin Amimoto. 2016. Waves of knowing: A seascape epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press.
James, Deborah. 2020. “The Alchemy of a Corpus of Underwater Images: Locating Carysfort to Reconcile our Human Relationship with a Coral Reef.” Nature and Culture 15 (3): 225–248. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2020.150301
Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild blue media: Thinking through seawater. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jue, Melody. 2022. “Submerging Inscription: On Corals and Thermal Stress.” ASAP/Journal 7 (2): 289–295. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/asa.2022.0028
Kim, Daejoong, Heasun Chun, Youngsun Kwak, and Yoonjae Nam. 2014. “The Employment of Dialogic Principles in Website, Facebook, and Twitter Platforms of Environmental Nonprofit Organizations.” Social Science Computer Review 32 (5): 590–605. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439314525752
Kittinger, John N., Trisann M. Bambico, Dwayne Minton, Alyssa Miller, Manuel Mejia, Nahaku Kalei, Bradley Wong, and Edward W. Glazier. 2016. “Restoring Ecosystems, Restoring Community: Socioeconomic and Cultural Dimensions of a Community-Based Coral Reef Restoration Project.” Regional Environmental Change 16 (2): 301–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-013-0572-x
Kolbert, E. 2014. The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. A&C Black.
Kovacs-Györi, Anna, Alina Ristea, Ronald Kolcsar, Bernd Resch, Alessandro Crivellari, and Thomas Blaschke. 2018. “Beyond Spatial Proximity—Classifying Parks and Their Visitors in London Based on Spatiotemporal and Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data” ISPRS International Journal of Geo- Information 7 (9): 378. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi7090378.
Lam, David PM, Elvira Hinz, Daniel J. Lang, Maria Tengö, Hernik von Wehrden, and Berta Martín-López. 2020. “Indigenous and local knowledge in sustainability transformations research: a literature review.” Ecology & Society 25 (1). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11305-250103.
Lang, Ursala. 2018. “Keep off the grass! New directions for geographies of yards and gardens.” Geography Compass 12 (8): e12397. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12397.
Lange, Ines D., and Chris T. Perry. 2020. “A quick, easy and non-invasive method to quantify coral growth rates using photogrammetry and 3D model comparisons.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 11 (6): 714–726. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13388
Leriche, Agathe, Charles-François Boudouresque, Guillaume Bernard, Patrick Bonhomme, and Jacques Denis. 2004. “A one-century suite of seagrass bed maps: can we trust ancient maps?.” Estuarine, coastal and shelf science 59 (2): 353–362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2003.09.007
Leujak, W. and R.F.G. Ormond. 2007. “Comparative accuracy and efficiency of six coral community survey methods.” Journal of experimental marine biology and ecology 351 (1-2): 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2007.06.028.
Loch, Theresa Klara, and Maraja Riechers. 2021. “Integrating indigenous and local knowledge in management and research on coastal ecosystems in the Global South: A literature review.” Ocean & Coastal Management 212: 105821. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2021.105821.
Losciale, Riccardo, Rachel Hay, Michael Rasheed, and Scott Heron. 2022.“The public perception of the role, importance, and vulnerability of seagrass. A case study from the Great Barrier Reef.” Environmental Development 44: 100757. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2022.100757.
Lovejoy, Kristen, and Gregory D. Saxton. 2012. “Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media*.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17 (3): 337–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01576.x
Lovejoy, Kristen, Richard D. Waters, and Gregory D. Saxton. 2012. “Engaging Stakeholders through Twitter: How Nonprofit Organizations Are Getting More out of 140 Characters or Less.” Public Relations Review 38 (2): 313–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2012.01.005
Meyers, Rennie. 2017. “An aesthetics of resilience: design and agency in contemporary coral restoration.” Resilience 5 (3): 201–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2016.1241477
Mikkelsen, Paula M., and Joel Cracraft. 2001. “Marine Biodiversity and the Need for Systematic Inventories.” Bulletin of Marine Science 69 (2): 525–34.
Milton, Kay. 2002. Loving nature: Towards an ecology of emotion. London: Routledge.
Moore, Amelia. 2021. “We've never seen anything like it: Witnessing coral death and resurrection.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11 (2): 461–474. https://doi.org/10.1086/716237
Nunziato, Dawn Carla. 2019. “From Town Square to Twittersphere: The Public Forum Doctrine Goes Digital.” Boston University Journal of Science & Technology Law 25 (Winter): 1.
O'Neil, Keri L., Rachel M. Serafin, Joshua T. Patterson, and Jamie RK Craggs. 2021. “Repeated ex situ spawning in two highly disease susceptible corals in the family Meandrinidae.” Frontiers in Marine Science 8: 669976. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.669976.
Ostrom, Elinor., 2009. “A polycentric approach for coping with climate change.” Available at SSRN 1934353.
Page, Christopher A., Erinn M. Muller, & David E. Vaughan. 2018. “Microfragmenting for the successful restoration of slow growing massive corals.” Ecological Engineering 123: 86–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2018.08.017.
Pickering, Catherine, Chelsey Walden-Schreiner, Agustina Barros, and Sebastian Dario Rossi. 2020. “Using Social Media Images and Text to Examine How Tourists View and Value the Highest Mountain in Australia.” Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism 29 (March): 100252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jort.2019.100252.
Prasetyo, Nurdina., Sebastian Filep, and Anna Carr., 2023. “Towards culturally sustainable scuba diving tourism: an integration of Indigenous knowledge.” Tourism Recreation Research 48 (3): 319–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2021.1925830
Rende, Sante Francesco, Alessandro Bosman, Rossella Di Mento, Fabio Bruno, Antonio Lagudi, Andrew D. Irving, Luigi Dattola et al., 2020. “Ultra-high-resolution mapping of Posidonia oceanica (L.) delile meadows through acoustic, optical data and object-based image classification.” Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 8 (9): 647. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse8090647.
Richards, Daniel R., and Daniel A. Friess. 2015. “A rapid indicator of cultural ecosystem service usage at a fine spatial scale: Content analysis of social media photographs.” Ecological Indicators 53: 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2015.01.034.
Roberts, Helen, Jon Sadler, and Lee Chapman. 2019. “The Value of Twitter Data for Determining the Emotional Responses of People to Urban Green Spaces: A Case Study and Critical Evaluation.” Urban Studies 56 (4): 818–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017748544
Roch, Cassandra., Sebastian Schmidt-Roach, and Carlos M. Duarte. 2023. “Coral restoration patents are disconnected from academic research and restoration practitioners.” Frontiers in Marine Science 9: 1093808. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.1093808.
Roshandel, Arbatani, T., S. Labafi, and M. Robati. 2016. “Effects of Social Media on the Environmental Protection Behaviour of the Public (Case Study: Protecting Zayandeh-Rood River Environment).” International Journal of Environmental Research 10 (2). https://doi.org/10.22059/ijer.2016.57718.
Rossi, Sebastian Dario, Agustina Barros, Chelsey Walden-Schreiner, and Catherine Pickering. 2020. “Using Social Media Images to Assess Ecosystem Services in a Remote Protected Area in the Argentinean Andes.” Ambio 49 (6): 1146–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01268-w
Saunders, Fred P. 2013. “Seeing and doing conservation differently: a discussion of landscape aesthetics, wilderness, and biodiversity conservation.” The Journal of Environment & Development 22 (1): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1070496512459960
Savage, Jessica M., Malcom D. Hudson, and Patrick E. Osborne. 2020. “The challenges of establishing marine protected areas in South East Asia.” In Marine protected areas pp. 343–359. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102698-4.00018-6.
Schirpke, Uta, Erich Tasser, Manuel Ebner, and Ulrike Tappeiner. 2021. “What can geotagged photographs tell us about cultural ecosystem services of lakes?” Ecosystem Services 51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2021.101354.
Smith, Bernard. 1959. European Vision and the South Pacific. New York: Yale University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2001. On photography (Vol. 48). Macmillan.
Spalding, Mark, Lauretta Burke, Spencer A. Wood, Joscelyne Ashpole, James Hutchison, and Philine zu Ermgassen. 2017. “Mapping the Global Value and Distribution of Coral Reef Tourism.” Marine Policy 82 (August): 104–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2017.05.014.
Suggett, David J., James Guest, Emma F. Camp, Alasdair Edwards, Liz Goergen, Margaux Hein, Adriana Humanes, Jessica S. Levy, Phanor H. Montoya-Maya, David J. Smith, Tali Vardi, R. Scott Winters, and Tom Moore. 2024. “Restoration as a meaningful aid to ecological recovery of coral reefs.” npj Ocean Sustainability 3 (1): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-024-00056-8
Svensson, Per G., Tara Q. Mahoney, and Marion E. Hambrick. 2015. “Twitter as a Communication Tool for Nonprofits: A Study of Sport-for-Development Organizations.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 44 (6): 1086–1106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764014553639
Terell, Tamar. 2021. “TikTok: The Most Visited Site of 2021.” Investis Digital. Accessed August 9, 2023. https://www.investisdigital.com/blog/technology/tiktok-most-visited-site-2021.
Thompson, Benjamin S., and Stephanie M. Rog. 2019. “Beyond ecosystem services: using charismatic megafauna as flagship species for mangrove forest conservation.” Environmental Science & Policy 102: 9–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.09.009.
Thompson, Krista A. 2006. An eye for the tropics: Tourism, photography, and framing the Caribbean picturesque. Duke University Press.
United Nations Environment, International Sustainability Unit, International Coral Reef Initiative, and Ecosystems Division. 2018. The Coral Reef Economy: The Business Case for Investment in the Protection, Preservation and Enhancement of Coral Reef Health - Executive Summary.
Uyarra, Maria C., Andrew R. Watkinson, and Isabelle M. Côté. 2009. “Managing Dive Tourism for the Sustainable Use of Coral Reefs: Validating Diver Perceptions of Attractive Site Features.” Environmental Management 43 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-008-9198-z
Wang, Wei, Chaoyang Wu, Qinhua Fang, and Odion Ikhumhen Harrison. 2023. “Cultural ecosystem services evaluation in a coastal city of China using social media data.” Ocean & Coastal Management 242: 106693. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2023.106693.
Weidmann, Franz, Jonas Jäger, Gereon Reus, Stewart T. Schultz, Claudia Kruschel, Viviane Wolff, and Klaus Fricke-Neuderth. 2019, June. “A closer look at seagrass meadows: Semantic segmentation for visual coverage estimation.” In OCEANS 2019-Marseille, pp. 1–6. IEEE. 10.1109/OCEANSE.2019.8867064.
West, Paige. 2016. Dispossession and the environment: Rhetoric and inequality in Papua New Guinea. Columbia University Press.
Wild, Christian, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Malik S. Naumann, M. Florencia Colombo-Pallotta, Mebrahtu Ateweberhan, William K. Fitt, Roberto Iglesias-Prieto, et al. 2011. “Climate Change Impedes Scleractinian Corals as Primary Reef Ecosystem Engineers.” Marine and Freshwater Research 62 (2): 205. https://doi.org/10.1071/MF10254.
Wolmer, William. 2005. “Wilderness gained, wilderness lost: wildlife management and land occupations in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld.” Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2): 260–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2004.12.022
Xuezhu, Zhai and Eckhart Lange. 2020. “Using Social Media to Expolre Perceptions of Ecosystem Services by Nature-Based Solution Projects.” Landscape Architecture Frontiers 8 (3): 58–78.