Demonstrating ReefSense: Leveraging water properties to create computational, climate-adaptive, artificial reefs

Corals are endangered from climate change, due to exposure to sunlight during times of especially high water temperature. However, constantly shading corals also harms them. We thus introduce ReefSense: a passive computational system that can help shade corals using the energy of the ocean to sense and actuate. We have prototyped and tested ReefSense setups with 3D printed– and off-the-shelf components: the key aspect is that the system uses the energy of temperature change and water flow to deploy shade when it is needed. We discuss ReefSense, a bachelor thesis project, as a point in a more general space of computation that can work with nature instead of against it, and allow future computational systems to integrate more tightly with the world.