Today, I got to be part of something that realized a dream I've had for over a year.
The year I started diving, there were no black rockfish to be seen in any of our dive sites. I learned about them, but I never saw any. Over the past few years, they've become more and more common, and we see them in numbers and many places. At the same time, I've become convinced that I'm seeing fewer and fewer reef fish on the reefs of Maui. My husband shares my perception, and there are a couple of studies that seem to bear it out.
What those two examples illustrate is that dive sites change with time, or may change with time . . . since the average lifespan of a diver in the sport is fairly short (some studies say less than five years) there is little institutional memory. Each new diver goes underwater with a sense of wonder of what he sees . . . but the old-timers say, "It was better when," and nobody really knows.
Global Underwater Explorers, an agency through which I have had some training, but which is also an agency with a heavy bent toward conservation, has begun an ambitious project. It's called Project Baseline, and the concept is to begin to create an archive of documentation of dive sites, whether they are reefs, wrecks, lakes, rivers, or anyplace else that divers go. Documentation can be photographic, narrative, or numeric, and it's keyed to Google Earth, so that repeated measurements, evaluations or photographs can be uploaded and indexed to the same site. The intent is to record the changes, positive or negative, in the places we visit.
Ever since I read about this idea, I've wanted to be involved with it. I've seen changes, and I know that the people who set rules and policies are rarely people who get to see the places I go. But it takes a critical mass of people to do good documentation, and for this project, it takes some folks who are more computer-savvy than I am, to help get the data archived properly.
Today, our Seattle group did our first Project Baseline dive. We picked a simple site, a common shore diving location that was easy to access and not too challenging in conditions. Because of the variety of kinds of sites that people can choose to document, the project guidelines require the local efforts to design and implement their own procedures, and this was our "proof of concept" dive . . . and it was my baby.
Some things worked and others didn't. We learned a lot about the site and about how to run this kind of group activity. And we had fun, and brought people together for a common purpose. It was not a polished thing, like the beautiful bathymetric survey of Whaler's Cove that the Monterey GUE folks did a while back, but it was our first outing. And it was a big step toward accomplishing something I've wanted to do for some time.
The year I started diving, there were no black rockfish to be seen in any of our dive sites. I learned about them, but I never saw any. Over the past few years, they've become more and more common, and we see them in numbers and many places. At the same time, I've become convinced that I'm seeing fewer and fewer reef fish on the reefs of Maui. My husband shares my perception, and there are a couple of studies that seem to bear it out.
What those two examples illustrate is that dive sites change with time, or may change with time . . . since the average lifespan of a diver in the sport is fairly short (some studies say less than five years) there is little institutional memory. Each new diver goes underwater with a sense of wonder of what he sees . . . but the old-timers say, "It was better when," and nobody really knows.
Global Underwater Explorers, an agency through which I have had some training, but which is also an agency with a heavy bent toward conservation, has begun an ambitious project. It's called Project Baseline, and the concept is to begin to create an archive of documentation of dive sites, whether they are reefs, wrecks, lakes, rivers, or anyplace else that divers go. Documentation can be photographic, narrative, or numeric, and it's keyed to Google Earth, so that repeated measurements, evaluations or photographs can be uploaded and indexed to the same site. The intent is to record the changes, positive or negative, in the places we visit.
Ever since I read about this idea, I've wanted to be involved with it. I've seen changes, and I know that the people who set rules and policies are rarely people who get to see the places I go. But it takes a critical mass of people to do good documentation, and for this project, it takes some folks who are more computer-savvy than I am, to help get the data archived properly.
Today, our Seattle group did our first Project Baseline dive. We picked a simple site, a common shore diving location that was easy to access and not too challenging in conditions. Because of the variety of kinds of sites that people can choose to document, the project guidelines require the local efforts to design and implement their own procedures, and this was our "proof of concept" dive . . . and it was my baby.
Some things worked and others didn't. We learned a lot about the site and about how to run this kind of group activity. And we had fun, and brought people together for a common purpose. It was not a polished thing, like the beautiful bathymetric survey of Whaler's Cove that the Monterey GUE folks did a while back, but it was our first outing. And it was a big step toward accomplishing something I've wanted to do for some time.