Johnny Gaskell is a marine biologist with over 20 years’ experience in marine tourism, research and education around Australia. Having spent the last 10 years focusing on the habitats of the Great Barrier Reef, Johnny combines his expertise with a passion for filmmaking and visual learning. He documents the Reef’s biodiversity, health, and environmental impacts, from the remote Far Northern deltaic reefs to the Swains’ patch reefs in the south. His current documentary work about unique geologic formations in the Reef and their role in protecting corals amid increasing disturbances enabled him to capture one of the GBR's most extreme years of coral bleaching and cyclonic impacts at varying scales across the Reef’s vast geographic footprint.

With scientific surveys still underway, the official full extent of impact from the summer of 2024 is still pending. Johnny will share a visual storyboard of his firsthand observations over 2024: from the microscopic process of symbiont loss and recovery, to the variability in impacts within a selection of individual reefs in the Northern and Southern GBR