This 3D visualization brings to life one of the seascapes Martínez Quintana encountered on her dives in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Using the interactive version of the model, people can zoom in and spin the imagery around to explore the textures and colors of the reef surface. As Martínez Quintana writes in a caption explaining the model, “Among the crevices and holes in the reef it is common to find coral recruits, and in cryptic spaces, sponges are also common.” Martínez Quintana rendered the model using the Agisoft Metashape computer program and hundreds of pictures — individual frames from videos — that she took. The visualization depicts a 50-by-50-centimeter section of the reef.

This 3D model depicts a small section of a coral reef in the U.S. Virgin Islands, focusing on the roughness or the irregularity of the reef at a millimeter scale, a characteristic of particular interest in Martínez Quintana’s research. The visualization makes it easy to understand this quality of the reef’s surface, highlighting rougher areas in gradients of green and yellow, and smoother areas in blue. The model encompasses a portion of coral reef off the coast of St. John that covers a roughly 50-by-50-centimeter area of the sea floor.

This stunning 3D model depicts a young coral, called a “recruit,” that has attached to a structure called a substrate. The recruit — the small, rounded organism perched atop the substrate — glows a bright bluish green under ultraviolet (UV) light due to fluorescent proteins found in the coral’s tissue. UV light is a useful tool in coral research, making it easy to locate tiny youngsters on reefs or in the lab, Martínez Quintana says. Vibrant, interactive models like this can be used in science education, she says. “When you have something visually pretty, you can use it to talk to kids and explain to children, ‘What is a young coral?’ These models are great because you can move them around. It’s a way to capture people’s attention,” Martínez Quintana says. “Corals are animals, not plants, but they share some similarities with plants,” she says. “They are sessile, meaning that the adult organisms can’t move on their own, and just as trees in the forest release seeds to be dispersed with the wind, corals release eggs or larvae that can be dispersed with the currents. But in contrast to a seed, a larva can swim and select where to attach on the reef. Larvae of corals cannot eat. They metamorphose into a polyp with a mouth after they attach to the reef. Then, they can’t move again, so where they attach would be crucial for their survival.” Martínez Quintana’s 3D model depicts a substrate used in a coral restoration project by The Nature Conservancy in the Coral Innovation Hub on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She completed an internship with the organization in 2021 to guide them on the application of 3D modeling for coral restoration projects, and she will apply these techniques to create artificial substrata for the restoration of deep reefs through a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rhode Island.