Challenge KUL 05 : ReefSpark: Lighting Up Hidden Reef Signals Through Data and AI

Imagine hundreds of tiny (typically overlooked) reef “islands” along our coastlines. Each is a biodiversity hotspot and early warning signal for climate stress, but we rarely survey them because traditional reef-survey kits are big, expensive, and require intensive labor.

Our challenge is to create a plug-and-play micro-habitat monitor that can be deployed by any coastal community in one dive and read from your phone.

Over one busy weekend we’ll:

1. Stream (live or simulated) sensor data (water temperature, salinity, pH, nitrate, dissolved oxygen) through a low-power ESP32 stack.

2. Merge it with open satellite & national reef datasets so our local probe has “global visibility.”

3. Train a lightweight AI model that flags bleaching risk or pollution events hours to days earlier than human surveys.

4. Make sense of everything in a slick web dashboard: tra]ic-light health scores, live graphs, and one-click SMS/email alerts for rangers and fishers.

1. A web-based dashboard showing historical analysis of ocean data; live monitoring of artificially mimicked data (to replicate as the data coming from reefSpark drone stack) and health scores of the reefs in realtime, alerts, and time-series visualizations; forecast and prediction page where there will be time-series forecasting of certain ocean data elements (like temperature, dissolved oxygen and etc.) and evaluate reef stress levels in real time; live geospatial insights dashboard showing the satellite data (e.g. Sentinel-2, Copernicus) for broader environmental context like sea surface temperature and chlorophyll levels.

2. A sensor data simulation pipeline (for turbidity, temperature, pH, etc.) to mimic live reef conditions

3. A basic hardware schematic for a low-power IoT module (ESP32-based) to illustrate real-world deployment

4. (Optional) An acoustic monitoring concept using reef sound data to detect ecosystem changes

• Data science

• AI, Marine biologist

• IoT / sensor integration

• Front-end / dashboard development

Essential team skills:

Development Goals for the 48-Hour Hackathon:

About the Challenge :