Coral City Camera – Live Urban Reef at PortMiami

The CCC is a non-profit citizen science art project. If you enjoy it, please consider making a small donation to the Coral City Foundation to help us maintain it: http://bit.ly/4iTqX3T

The Coral City Camera is an underwater camera streaming live from an urban reef environment in Miami, Florida. It is located along the shoreline at the east end of PortMiami in about 9' (3m) of water. It was deployed in late 2019 by Coral Morphologic as a hybrid art-science research project produced with the support of Bridge Initiative and Bas Fisher Invitational and initially funded through grants awarded by a Knight Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The CCC's high speed internet connection is made possible with the support of The Wanderlust Fund.

To see timestamps of the most interesting and unusual fish and marinelife of the past day check here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EYMzLWa2oONrEwiQvdZJJ49RyXm5fOiU8Xzwge8CT60/edit?usp=sharing

This is the list of fish species we've observed on the Coral City Camera (220 so far): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EzVV0zXiOdmYwHDDynsEZXecmh_VrEJuDu50quf3UAA/edit?usp=sharing

To see a photo guide of the fish species most commonly seen on the Coral City Camera see here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e7hBGzVKFb6FFCwu78Jb5kE10IfBsR-blawzL_vBO6A/edit?usp=sharing

To see the current and past water temperature see our Aqualink Buoy: https://aqualink.org/sites/1024

The Coral City Camera provides a fish-eye view into the urban marine ecosystem that has developed around the human-made shorelines of Miami. The project was launched with the idea that the incredible biodiversity living just below the waterline in Miami should be a point of civic pride that engages the public to protect what they know and love. The riprap boulder shoreline along PortMiami demonstrates that human infrastructure can offer imperiled species with refuge and functional habitat in unexpected urban locations as well as serve as conveniently accessible research sites.

While the abundance of fish and marine life makes for a real-life aquarium screensaver you can enjoy all day, the Coral City Camera also serves as a valuable scientific tool to monitor the health and wellbeing of this underwater life in a non-invasive fashion. Coral Morphologic is working with the AOML Coral Program to sample and record the site's water parameters while using the camera for ongoing biodiversity documentation.

Watch live as sharks, sawfish, manatees, and over 220 tropical fish species move through this thriving urban reef habitat just offshore from downtown Miami. This is citizen science and public art in action—a window into one of the world's most biodiverse urban marine ecosystems, maintained for research, education, and community stewardship.