Research Team Launches Coral Cartography at AAORIA 2026
An international team of scientists is launching Coral Cartography: Mapping Atlantic Cold-Water Corals to support Area Based Management at the 2026 All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance (AAORIA) Forum, a flagship gathering of the Atlantic scientific community.
Funded through one of the funding calls of the Coral Research and Development Accelerator Platform (CORDAP), a G20 initiative launched in 2020 to fast-track solutions to protect the world’s corals, the project unites experts from nine countries across the Atlantic in image-based survey, coral taxonomy, mapping, management, and policy engagement, including Norway, UK, Portugal, Germany, Mauritania, Namibia, South Africa, Uruguay and Brazil.
Cold-water corals (CWC) are a critical component of deep-sea ecosystems, facing growing threats from fishing, deep-sea mining, and climate change. While the North Atlantic benefits from relatively rich data on coral distribution, the Central and South Atlantic remain significantly under-researched.
The international team will address that gap by unlocking large repositories of previously unanalyzed imagery data. including from the EAF Nansen Programme off the West African Margin, and new data to be collected later this year off Brazil, bringing together knowledge and expertise from across the Atlantic basin to build a comprehensive picture of cold-water coral habitats for the first time.
The project will develop a standardized dataset of coral distribution and density in the Atlantic for those areas already explored. These will then be used to train machine-learning models to predict the distribution of corals in other areas, effectively enabling the team to fill the gaps.
It is hoped that the resulting maps of cold-water coral distribution, density, and diversity, under both current conditions and future climate change scenarios, will be used to identify areas at risk and candidate sites for protection within national Exclusive Economic Zones and on the High Seas.
Crucially, findings will be communicated directly to key international decision-making bodies, including Regional Fisheries Management Organisations, the International Seabed Authority, the Convention on Biological Diversity, OSPAR, and national governments, with the aim of securing legal protections for critical cold-water coral ecosystems. A central pillar of the project is training a new generation of cold-water coral researchers and forging lasting collaborative relationships among Atlantic nation scientists.
The project launch is taking place at the AAORIA Forum in Salvador, Bahia, hosted by the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. which brings together the Atlantic community to advance ocean science, international cooperation, and collaborative action. The Forum advances the All-Atlantic Declaration, signed in 2022 by Argentina, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Canada, Morocco, South Africa, the United States of America, and the European Union, with growing support from further countries and partners.
The project is being led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) alongside 11 project partners, including University of Plymouth (UK), University of Aveiro (Portugal), Mauritanian Institute of Oceanographic and Fisheries Research (Mauritania), South East Atlantic Fisheries Organisation (Namibia), Nelson Mandela University (South Africa), University of Vale do Itajaí (Brazil), Federal University of Espírito Santo (Brazil), Institute of Marine Research, (Norway), University of Gibraltar, Bielefeld University (Germany) and Centro Universitario Regional del Este (Uruguay).