Why Reefs Can't Wait
Reefs do not have decades to wait. Project EPOCH is designed to detect pollution, tie it back to its source, remediate the discharge, and fund the next year of the program from the biomass it removes.
Project EPOCH is in pre-implementation. The system described on this site begins deployment in Year 1 of the validation program.
Pollution drives reef collapse.
Bleaching gets the headlines. The chronic stressor is land-based pollution, which strips reefs of resilience long before any thermal event arrives. In Hawaiʻi the evidence is peer-reviewed and consistent, and it shows damage occurring at concentrations well below current regulatory thresholds.
Hawaiʻi cesspools discharge ~5.1 million kg of nitrogen per year. Most of it reaches the reef as ammonium via submarine groundwater. (HDOH, 2020)
Above 2 µM dissolved inorganic nitrogen, invasive algae growth accelerates and bleaching risk compounds with thermal stress. (Stimson & Larned, 2000)
Diuron causes photosystem II inhibition in coral zooxanthellae at 0.05 µg/L. At 1 µg/L it reduces coral reproductive output six-fold. (Cantin et al., 2007)
Copper from antifouling paint suppresses coral larval settlement above 3 µg/L. The result is a recruitment failure that compounds across reproductive seasons.
NOAA Degree Heating Weeks ≥ 8°C-weeks correlates with greater than 50% coral mortality. The pollution stressors above lower the threshold at which mortality begins.
First comprehensive Oʻahu UV filter assessment found oxybenzone concentrations up to 136 parts per trillion at Waikīkī Beach, over twice the reproductive disruption threshold. (ScienceDaily, 2019)
Engineered as a single system.
Most reef interventions tackle one variable at a time. Project EPOCH is designed to bring continuous detection, enforcement-grade source attribution, in-situ remediation, and operational revenue into one system. The four principles below shape every design decision.
Every instrument and survey is designed to produce both an immediate scientific reading and a labeled training example for the AI models. The same dataset is structured to compress what would otherwise be five years of site-by-site validation into a methodology that can transfer to the next reef in one year.
Federal and Hawaiʻi state regulatory thresholds for oxybenzone, diuron, and copper allow concentrations the peer-reviewed literature has shown to damage coral. Filter performance is designed against the ecotoxicological effect thresholds in that literature. The regulatory minimum is met automatically by design; the engineering target sits well below it.
Synoptic imagery resolves what ground sensors cannot see: invasive algae blooms across hundreds of hectares, submarine groundwater discharge plumes far from any sonde, and thermal stress at the basin scale. Acquisition starts on free public satellites (Sentinel, MODIS, Landsat) and only graduates to commercial constellations and then owned UAV hardware as operational revenue and validation accumulate.
Five years of full validation across three Hawaiʻi reefs are intended to yield a deployment standard for any qualifying marine site worldwide. If a tool, a model, or a measurement cannot transfer to the next site inside a year, the program does not adopt it.
Hawaiʻi validation, then global.
Ground sensor network online. BlueROV2 surveys begin. Source attribution lab operational. Indigenous partnerships established prior to data collection.
Biorefinery Unit 1 deployed at Kāneʻohe Bay. Filter arrays deploy. Planet SuperDove acquisition begins. First operational revenue.
Biorefinery Unit 2 deployed at Maunalua Bay. Ecotourism program launches Month 19. UAV hyperspectral program begins.
Biorefinery Unit 3 deployed at Waikīkī. Full three-site capacity. AI models validated against five years of ground truth across all three reef systems.
Global expansion. Validated 1-year deployment standard exported to qualifying marine sites worldwide.
The non-negotiables.
Federal and Hawaiʻi state marine water-quality regulations contain no enforceable limits for oxybenzone or diuron at the levels peer-reviewed studies have shown cause coral physiological damage. A 2023 systematic review in Environmental Evidenceconcluded that the current regulatory reference values for copper, diuron, and irgarol 1051 are insufficiently protective.
Filter performance is designed against the ecotoxicological effect thresholds in the published literature. The regulatory minimum sits far below the engineering target.
Every output of the program is open-source by default, under a permissive license. Water quality and benthic survey datasets are licensed CC0. The GIS database API and training code are licensed Apache 2.0. Model weights for benthic segmentation and species classification are licensed OpenRAIL. Peer-reviewed publications and 3D-printed product design files are licensed CC-BY 4.0.
A narrow set of bioremediation and biorefinery compositions is retained as proprietary for ecological-safety reasons described under Pillar 03.