my friend Hajime Nishimura (Second Life: Yan Lauria) and i have been curating the Abyss Observatory at Farwell for about seven years now.
on the 24th of this month, a webinar on Coastal Ecosystem and Management will be held, and Hajime and i will be sharing a visit to Farwell, together with our friend Linda Morris Kelley (Second Life: Delia Lake).
here's the abstract of our sharing, and the video from the session is shared after the abstract:
The scientific research about coastal ecosystems and their importance to humanity is both solidly founded and ongoing. Scientists share the facts widely. Yet human activity is destroying these coastal ecologies and marine habitats, and officials with authority to protect these environments significantly undervalue them by law and policy. Knowing the facts and information is seldomly sufficient to move people to responsible action.
People say they care about coasts and oceans but their actions belie that. Though protection and livelihoods of millions of people around the world depend on coastal ecosystems resources, people treat these resources carelessly. Shorelines are awash with plastic trash. Untreated sewage and agricultural fertilizer runoff encourage algal blooms with seasonal eutrophication damaging ecosystems adjacent to highly populated coastal areas worldwide. Trawling and overfishing destroy coastal ecosystems, sometimes beyond recovery. Climate change is adding to the already present stresses these ecosystems suffer. How can we change this?
Unfortunately, most people have never had an opportunity to experience and enjoy any of these amazing socio-ecological spaces. While we cannot show them all the world’s physical coastal ecosystems, we can do that in immersive 3D virtual geospaces.
Our virtual tour of eight simulated coastal ecosystems at The Abyss Observatory, an educational resource on the 3D interactive platform of Second Life® gives people a sense of “being there” and produces lasting memories of real, meaningful feelings of engagement. Caring is built on memories of experiences that touch people. People protect things they care about.
The featured builds are two Tropical habitats – a mangrove forest and a coral reef, four Temperate habitats – an oak and holly forest, a Temperate rainforest, ocean banks, and a kelp forest, and two Arctic and Subarctic habitats – coastal tundra and cold-water coral reef, all key ecosystems for global sustainability.
