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Funding will go towards the monitoring of endangered turtles and seabirds in the Great Barrier Reef, including Raine Island.
The real estate brand’s executive chairman Angus Raine is the great-great-grandson of Captain Thomas Raine, the first European to spot Raine Island’s shores in 1815.
Mr Raine hopes that his almost 140-year-old family-owned company will come full circle in supporting preservation efforts for the island that his ancestor shared a history with.
“The Reef is one of the seven natural wonders of the world, and we are pleased to see our funding help to protect this amazing natural ecosystem and support the impactful work of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation,” he explained.
“We are delighted that our funding will go towards monitoring and tracking green turtles on the Great Barrier Reef using artificial intelligence and drones to better understand their behaviours.”
The Raine & Horne Foundation — founded in July 2021 — is the brand’s private philanthropic organisation, with the financial support of the GBRF being the foundation’s biggest social engagement to date.
The donation will aid the development of a joint project between the Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF) and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) that seeks to use artificial intelligence to monitor endangered turtles and seabirds.
This will enable QUT to continue the work started by the six-year Raine Island Recovery Project, a collaboration between the GBRF, the Queensland government, BHP, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and Wuthathi People and Meriam Nation (Ugar, Mer, Erub) People.
Raine Island is reportedly the world’s largest nesting site for the endangered green turtle and is located 620 kilometres north-west of Cairns in Wuthathi Sea Country.
This remote land and its marine life have been culturally significant to Cape York’s Wuthathi Nation and the Torres Strait’s Meriam Nation as far back as 60,000 years.
Traditional knowledge is informing western science in best practice for the island that is home to 90 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef’s green turtles.
“Innovation and collaboration are at the heart of this project,” GBRF managing director Anna Marsden said.
“QUT researchers are investigating how artificial intelligence and deep learning can be used to detect and count turtles from live drone video feeds as well as detect and classify different species of seabirds from drone images.”
According to Ms Marsden, one season alone on Raine Island can see up to 64,000 green turtles counted via drone footage.
“We are increasingly turning to technology to automate how we monitor this incredibly important turtle population,” she said.
Ms Marsden stated that the Raine & Horne Foundation would help “continue to protect our Great Barrier Reef’s irreplaceable ecosystem and the incredible diversity of wildlife that call it home”.
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