2010 Annual Report of the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation

By many measures, 2010 was a notable year for the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. This year, the Foundation turned ten years old. From the perspective of the age of our oceans, ten years is only a blink in time. From the perspective of one fish in the sea, it could be a lifetime. From my perspective, the first ten years of the Living Oceans Foundation represented the organization’s first generation. This was a time of formation, discovery, learning experiences, capacity building and refining of capabilities. The Foundation is now poised to embark upon its second generation.

2010 marked a transition in the Foundation’s life. We recently completed a four-year program of intensive exploration and surveying of the rich coral reef ecosystems spanning the entire Red Sea coastline of Saudi
Arabia. My staff has been intensively engaged in the business of processing reams of data and turning data into useful knowledge. We created 25,000 sq km of high-resolution habitat maps of the Saudi Arabian coral reefs, which will be invaluable to coral reef management activities now and in the future. Our hope is that the resultant products from our Red Sea research program will have substantial impact on marine conservation efforts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

By the time you read this annual report, the Living Oceans Foundation will be embarked on its most ambitious program to date: the Global Reef Expedition. This five-year circumnavigation of the globe is designed to rapidly survey and characterize coral reef ecosystems around the world. Our overarching objective is to gain deep understanding of coral reef ecology in order to improve man’s ability to sustainably manage this valuable ocean resource. We believe that our role in closing some of the significant knowledge-gaps in coral reef science will be critical in the race to preserve these threatened ecosystems. Throughout this ambitious program, we will continue to embrace our Science Without Borders® program by engaging local scientists, educators, and resource managers in all of our operations, educational programs and research activities.

These are exciting times for our Foundation and I hope you will join us “on-line” throughout the Global Reef Expedition. We need your interest, your concern and your involvement to protect our living oceans!