Back in 2018 I was chatting to some shark researcher mates about their GPS tracking efforts, and how they were using video to manually animate their tagged sharks’ movements across the Great Barrier Reef. I love maps, and I thought I could speed up their workflow with a web-based animation they could screen record. I think they were dubious at the time, but I spent a few hours knee-deep in mapbox and codepen and sent through a rough demo anyway [1].
We didn’t really discuss it again until January 2019 when one of their whale sharks (GBR1), who I’d included in the demo, started pinging in frequently while tracking north towards Papua New Guinea. It was a real thrill to watch and became one of the longest recorded tracks for a whale shark.
I run the tech side of things at a very “4 people” small conservation network on the Great Barrier Reef. Our role, as we see it, is to engage people in all things Reef, to educate and inspire them, and hopefully lead them into taking action towards its future. And a marine-life tracking platform suddenly seemed like a very interesting proposition.
I spent two months in design and build, my wife (and co-worker) wrote copy, and our CEO Andy put on his spruiking shoes, and in March 2019 we launched ReefTracks.org [TL;DR] with a number of sharks, some green turtles, a manta ray, GBR1 the whale shark, and a focus on conservation. A month later the BBC were on the Reef to broadcast a live turtle release to the world, and tracked it using our platform [2]. Then Uber lent us a sub [3]. After which everything went quiet until early this year when, through a strange twist of fate, we missed a deadline and entered Reef Tracks into the Webbys instead.
You read a lot of gripe about awards outfits like the Webbys. Paid entries, category cash-grab, tilted towards the big end of town. It’s the same in every industry. I’m not sure exactly how much we paid to enter two categories in this year’s awards, but it was north of AU$1000 with the exchange rate. To put that in perspective, it’s around 0.3% of our annual operating budget as a charity [4].
And was it worth it? Well, we lucked out and picked up a nomination for ‘Best Science Website’. Which dropped us in the green room alongside @NatGeo (23 million followers) and @nasa (infinity) … with a site built out of cereal boxes and borrowed time, in a council-donated office in Cairns (a small reef town in the middle of nowhere), Australia.
Our bandwidth is way up (Cloudflare reports over 18GB served in the last 24 hours), people are engaging more than ever with our educational (snore) social channels [5], and it’s already opening doors we thought were walls. And all thanks to a highly-predictable, sure-loss, paid-for-the-privilege, semi-public poll (ahem).
Most importantly it has the potential to put an international spotlight on the Reef and its inhabitants at a critical time in their history.
So if you’d like to know how Fletcher spends his afternoons (as a 4m, 500kg tiger shark), or investigate the rank and file of a mysterious whale shark congregation in the northern GBR then please take a look. If you want to back us for the win (ha!) please do - there’s a link below [6]. Or if you have any suggestions, requests or massive criticisms please let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading.
[1] https://codepen.io/theprojectsomething/full/pxXNwd
[2] https://twitter.com/BBCEarth/status/1111361530451374080
[3] https://citizensgbr.org/explore/reef-tracks/scuber-agincourt-reef
[4] https://www.acnc.gov.au/charity/90a518adbdc2023bf192f43b6ca80eb7
[5] https://twitter.com/citizensGBR
[6] https://reeftracks.org/webbys