By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Columnist

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a lot of scientists learning lots of stuff, but not much of it is very accessible to the average citizen.

The new Coral Reef Information System (CoRIS) hopes to change that, said Mark McCaffrey, science communication specialist with the NOAA paleoclimatology program.

McCaffrey has been visiting Samoa and the Hawaiian Islands during the past couple of weeks holding meetings on the program. The last few sessions are from 10 a.m. to noon today at Maui Community College's Marine Option Program room, 10 a.m. to noon tomorrow at the Department of Land and Natural Resources offices on Punchbowl Street in Honolulu, and 8 a.m. to noon Wednesday at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa Campus Center.

He'll be talking with anyone who shows up, seeking information on how CoRIS can best meet the needs of the public — including how to put the scientific data into forms that make it useful. He'll also be on the lookout for obvious gaps in the data — areas that need further research. You can reach him by e-mail at mark.mccaffrey@noaa.gov.

CoRIS aims to be the first place you go for information about coral reefs — including the ones out in front of your own Hawai'i community. It will eventually include maps, satellite and aerial images of reefs, along with data on coral disease and coral biology, the status of reefs worldwide and lots more. Some of the information is already available on the Web site.

"We want this to be a clearing house for all NOAA coral research," he said.

You might want to know something about sea level change, tides, the composition of the ocean floor in a certain area, when corals spawn, where reefs are diseased, or covered with sediment, or bleached. The Web site is already chock full of enough information to be a wonderland for a student working on a paper on coral reefs, but McCaffrey said the agency really wants it to be of use to folks more generally.

In part, that's because NOAA figures that people who understand the reefs will do a better job of taking care of them. Here, from the Web site, is some of the reasoning why NOAA thinks preservation is needed:

"Current estimates note that 10 percent of all coral reefs are degraded beyond recovery. Thirty percent are in critical condition and may die within 10 to 20 years. Experts predict that if current pressures are allowed to continue unabated, 60 percent of the world's coral reefs may die completely by 2050."

If coral reefs protect coastal land, feed the fish, provide habitat for all kinds of marine life, as well as provide habitat for skin-diving, money-spending tourists, then protecting those reefs is a arguably a good idea.

Jan TenBruggencate is The Advertiser's Kaua'i bureau chief and its science and environment writer. Reach him at (808) 245-3074 or jant@honoluluadvertiser.com.