Can AI Save the Maldives’ Coral Reefs?

I should be watching my dive buddy, but I’m distracted by a giant clam. It’s electric blue mottled with black swirls, like ink dispersing in water. A pink-striped parrot fish is munching on a piece of coral nearby; a cobalt-blue starfish clings to the reef. I exhale, letting bubbles escape, and the giant clam slams shut.

It’s my first glimpse of the underwater world surrounding Six Senses Kanuhura in the Maldives’ Lhaviyani Atoll, a place that looks, from above, like the very definition of a tropical escape. The only way to reach this island resort is by seaplane. The day before, I’d boarded the 12-seater from the capital, Malé, feeling a little apprehensive. A tropical storm had rolled in, wrapping the airport’s lagoon in sea mist so thick it swallowed the aircraft as it bobbed beside the jetty.

But the weather changed as quickly as it had arrived. Within minutes of take-off, the clouds peeled back to reveal the Maldives from above: more than a thousand islands scattered across the Indian Ocean like emeralds, each ringed by dazzling halos of white sand and turquoise water. Resorts appeared one after another — neat rows of thatched-roof overwater villas stretching into lagoons so clear they barely looked real.

Now, six metres below the surface with a tank strapped to my back, I realise that what I saw from the air was only the start. The water is so clear I can see every fold and contour of the reef below. Giant dome-shaped corals rise from the seabed, their weathered surfaces carved into intricate whorls like enormous brains. Between them, delicate branching corals in muted shades of lemon and lilac teem with tiny reef fish darting in and out with the swell, creating the illusion that the corals themselves are breathing.

A few metres ahead of me, marine biologist James Cordery is doing what he calls ‘the lawnmower’. Both arms stretched out in front of him, he grips a metal pole fitted with three GoPro cameras as he swims methodically back and forth across a 10-by-10-metre patch of reef. Every half a second, the three GoPros click into action, capturing thousands of overlapping photographs that will later be stitched together into a 3D model of the reef. In three months, he’ll return to this exact patch of reef to do it all over again. “The whole point is consistency,” he tells me later. “We’re trying to photograph the reef from exactly the same perspective each time.”

I hover just outside the survey plot, trying not to drift into his path. It feels strangely meditative. While James works, I begin noticing things I’d have otherwise swum straight past: tiny fish no bigger than my fingernail darting in and out of coral crevices; a lionfish peeking its striped head out to inspect me before slipping back into the shadows.

About 20 minutes into the dive, James makes a circle with his fingers — the diver’s sign for ‘OK’ and signal that he’s finished surveying the site. With plenty of air still in our tanks, we swim towards the reef wall.

I kick my fins over the 30-metre drop-off and my stomach lurches. For a split second, it feels as though I’m stepping off a precipice, but instead of falling, I hang weightless in the water, millions of tiny plankton drifting past and into the darkness below. As they disappear into the blue, James points ahead. At first, I can make out only a shadow, but as it glides closer, the shape becomes unmistakable: a reef shark, at least two metres long. Moments later, two large tuna emerge from behind it, their silvery flanks catching the light and flashing like scattered tinsel.

By the time we reach the surface, James is elated — but not because we saw a shark. “Today we surveyed 1,027 coral colonies,” he says, barely taking his regulator out. “That would normally take around seven hours and several divers. We did it in about 20 minutes.”

We’re diving Kanuhura Beru, a reef around 15 minutes by boat from Six Senses Kanuhura. It’s one of four sites around the island taking part in the Kanuhura Coral Census, a pioneering reef-monitoring project developed with researchers from Newcastle University and University College London (UCL). Using underwater photogrammetry (combining thousands of overlapping photographs into a precisely measured digital model of the reef), AI and 3D modelling, it allows the resort’s marine biologists to monitor their reefs with the same scientific precision as leading marine institutions.

“Before, I’d have to survey the reef using a tape measure and underwater slate, and then input the data by hand,” says James as we clamber back onto the boat and peel off our fins. Originally from the UK, James recently left a DPhil (PhD) in fish behaviour at Oxford University to pursue hands-on coral reef research in the Maldives. Today, he heads up the Coral Census project as Six Senses Kanuhura’s lead resident marine biologist. “Not only are traditional reef surveys extremely
time-consuming, but they also allow for a lot of human error and bias.”

A New Way of Seeing

Back at the resort, James plugs the cameras into his laptop and pulls up a remarkably detailed 3D model of the reef we just explored. He’s giddy with excitement. Zooming into one corner of the model, he points to a coral colony no bigger than my thumbnail and suddenly stops. “That wasn’t there three months ago,” he says, leaning closer to the screen with one hand on his chin.

Out on the reef, neither of us had noticed the speck of baby coral. Yet here, James can compare it with images captured three months earlier, measuring not just whether it has survived, but exactly how much it has grown, down to the millimetre. In a rapidly warming ocean, James hopes that understanding exactly which corals survive — and why — will help better inform future conservation efforts.

“How do you protect what you don’t understand?” he says. “We’re not just looking at how the reef is doing as a whole anymore — we’re telling the stories of thousands of corals.”

As we finish uploading the images from today’s dive, coral researcher John Stratford joins us on a video call from UCL, where he’s helping develop the technology behind the Coral Census. Together, he and James adapted it for use at Six Senses Kanuhura, allowing the resort’s marine biologists to monitor their reefs using the same technological standard as leading marine research institutions.

“I’d have been very sceptical of putting my name to clipboard data collected at a tourist resort,” John tells me. “Whereas this 3D model gives us a highly accurate record of exactly what was there at that moment in time.” That confidence, he says, is what made the partnership with Six Senses possible. “Before, I spent all of my research budget travelling to reefs around the world,” he says. “Then I thought: resorts are already in these incredible locations. They’ve got dive boats, dive access and people like James who are out there every day. It was an opportunity to dramatically expand the reach of coral research without the cost of mounting dedicated expeditions.”

Everything Is Connected

The next morning, I’m kayaking through the island’s seagrass meadows with Athif Mohamed, Six Senses Kanuhura’s resident turtle biologist and part of the first cohort to graduate from Maldives National University with a marine science degree.

From the kayak, the dark water filled with long ribbons of seagrass looks far less inviting than the coral reefs and turquoise lagoons I’d dived the day before. When Athif hands me my snorkel gear, I hesitate, but slip in anyway.

Below the waves, the seagrass dances in the current, catching the light and flickering through different shades of green. Hundreds of tiny oxygen bubbles cling to the blades before drifting towards the surface. Small fish weave between the swaying grass like they’re slipping through curtains. A baby blacktip reef shark, no longer than a ruler, glides past. Then a pair of eagle rays skim low over the meadow, their wing-like fins brushing the seagrass as they chase one another through the shallows.

“They’re mating, which is rare to see,” Athif states. At just 23, he talks about the ocean with an infectious enthusiasm, breaking into a broad smile whenever he points out another species.

As we snorkel on, I notice ragged strips of white plastic snagged beneath the seagrass. “That was used to kill it,” Athif says. Before Six Senses took over the resort, plastic sheeting was laid across the seabed to smother the meadows in favour of the postcard turquoise lagoons visitors expected — something some Maldivian resorts continue to do, Athif tells me. Since then, Six Senses has removed around four tonnes of it in the hopes of reviving its seagrass meadows.

“Seagrass isn’t what tourists expect to see in the Maldives; they think it’s ugly. But it’s one of the most important ecosystems we have. Green turtles eat around two kilograms of it every day before returning to the reef to rest. Everything’s connected.”

While guiding guests through the lagoon, Athif and James record seagrass species and the animals that depend on it. This is still done by hand, but James has already begun applying the same AI tools used in the Coral Census to speed up the analysis — and hopes one day to map the meadows using photogrammetry, too. “I’d like to have the same level of understanding of the seagrass as we do of the reef,” says James. “The goal is to understand these ecosystems well enough to make better decisions about how to protect them.”

On my final morning, I snorkel out to a reef just beyond my overwater villa. Schools of surgeonfish and butterflyfish flicker around me, while tiny six-line wrasse dart between the coral. I linger over a large, ancient-looking boulder coral for a little longer than I usually would, wondering how much of its story remains invisible to the naked eye. Nearby, a handful of empty metal coral frames lie half-buried in the sand. Once considered one of the best tools for reef restoration, they now feel like a reminder of how much we still have to learn.

That afternoon, my seaplane lifts off for Malé. From above, the Maldives is every bit as breathtaking as it was when I arrived. But its future may depend less on the turquoise water that first captures visitors’ attention than on what lies hidden beneath it: a tiny new coral colony, a meadow of seagrass once dismissed as an eyesore, and the biologists returning day after day to understand them a little better.