For the last couple of years, we’ve been working with Charlie Veron, Mary Stafford-Smith, Emre Turak and Lyndon DeVantier on a project that’s just been launched at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Hawaii, namely the “Corals of the World” web site.

 A screenshot of the new website

The team behind the site launched the Beta version of the project at the ICRS on Monday, 20th June in Honololu to a large audience, covering an outline of the website, the background to it, and ran a Q&A session.  They’ve asked for people to provide feedback on the site and to start providing additional materials as they aim to preserve what we know about coral reefs in digital form.  Specifically, they’ve asked people to:

1.           Take a tour of the website by selecting ‘Video tour’ at the bottom right of the home page (or click here). It takes about 15 minutes

2.           Read our accounts of issues of interest and future directions.

3.           Play with the website. You will find that many components that have been in planning are not yet operational, but the following are:

• Species Factsheets
• Taxon Finder in the Coral Taxonomy menu
• Coral Geographic

4.           Note that the first completed version is still some way off:

• The author’s full dataset is not yet loaded,
• Major components not yet included will be added sequentially, and
• There will be updates of the whole website when needed.

For those who are not at the ICRS meeting you can contribute comments, information and/or photos via the website, via the Feedback form you can access from the footer of any the pages (or click here).

We will be publishing a more detailed blog about the project, and what’s behind the scenes in it, in the near future, but for now take a look around the site and provide the authors with feedback.  As always, you can email us, or start a conversation on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers