From the Editor's Desk

The algorithmic ocean: How AI Is revolutionizing marine conservation

Dyhia Belhabib’s journey to becoming a marine scientist began with war funerals on TV. Her hometown, on the pine-forested slopes of the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria, lies only 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. But a trip to the beach was dangerous. A bitter civil war raged across the mountains as she was growing up in the 1990s; the conflict was particularly brutal for Belhabib’s people, the Berbers, one of the Indigenous peoples of North Africa. As she puts it: “We didn’t go to the ocean much, because you could get killed on the way there.”

The ocean surfaced in her life in another way, on state-run television. When an important person was assassinated or a massacre occurred, broadcasters would interrupt regular programming to show a sober documentary. They frequently chose a Jacques Cousteau film, judged sufficiently dignified and neutral to commemorate the deaths. Whenever she saw the ocean on television, Belhabib would wonder who had died. “My generation thinks of tragedies when we see the ocean,” she says. “I didn’t grow to love it in my youth.”

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