Back in 2018 I was chatting to some shark researcher mates about their GPS tracking efforts, and how they were using video to manually animate their tagged sharks’ movements across the Great Barrier Reef. I love maps, and I thought I could speed up their workflow with a web-based animation they could screen record. I think they were dubious at the time, but I spent a few hours knee-deep in mapbox and codepen and sent through a rough demo anyway [1].

We didn’t really discuss it again until January 2019 when one of their whale sharks (GBR1), who I’d included in the demo, started pinging in frequently while tracking north towards Papua New Guinea. It was a real thrill to watch and became one of the longest recorded tracks for a whale shark.

I run the tech side of things at a very “4 people” small conservation network on the Great Barrier Reef. Our role, as we see it, is to engage people in all things Reef, to educate and inspire them, and hopefully lead them into taking action towards its future. And a marine-life tracking platform suddenly seemed like a very interesting proposition.

I spent two months in design and build, my wife (and co-worker) wrote copy, and our CEO Andy put on his spruiking shoes, and in March 2019 we launched ReefTracks.org with a number of sharks, some green turtles, a manta ray, GBR1 the whale shark, and a focus on conservation. A month later the BBC were on the Reef to broadcast a live turtle release to the world, and tracked it using our platform [2]. Then Uber lent us a sub [3]. After which everything went quiet until early this year when, through a strange twist of fate ...

... continued: https://gist.github.com/theprojectsomething/70a207ba05cd385b7c328cffd390113e

  [1] https://codepen.io/theprojectsomething/full/pxXNwd
  [2] https://twitter.com/BBCEarth/status/1111361530451374080
  [3] https://citizensgbr.org/explore/reef-tracks/scuber-agincourt-reef