We Need Kelp Restoration Volunteers

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SM Baykeeper

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Location
Santa Monica, CA
The California Coastkeeper Alliance has been involved in an underwater restoration and monitoring program in the kelp beds of Southern California since 1997. About 150 active volunteers participate in the Kelp Restoration Project with Santa Monica and San Diego Baykeepers, Santa Barbara Channelkeeper, and Orange County Coastkeeper.
The goal of our program is to restore kelp to areas along the coast where it historically thrived. Human and natural influences have caused drastic declines in kelp density in many places, as well as complete loss in others. Waning populations of fish and other animals depend on kelp for food and shelter. When the kelp is gone, as many as 800 species find themselves homeless. We have had many successes restoring kelp beds, but there is much more work to be done. We are always looking for qualified volunteer divers to help the kelp!
In Malibu we normally dive on weekday and weekend mornings, making 2-3 dives each trip. The diving is free and air fills for volunteers are provided by local dive shops. Divers participate in monitoring activities, such as substrate surveys, benthic organism assessments and fish counts, as well as kelp restoration. Due to our pending organizational AAUS membership, we require that volunteer divers are both advanced and rescue certified, and are comfortable diving in cold water and high surge conditions. Please contact one of the four Keepers if you are interested in helping us help the kelp:

Los Angeles: Santa Monica Baykeeper
captainkelp@smbaykeeper.org
310-305-9645 x3

San Diego: San Diego Baykeeper
colleen@sdbaykeeper.org
619-758-7743

Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Channelkeeper
jessie@sbck.org
805-563-3377

Orange County: Orange County Coastkeeper
kelpkeeper@mindspring.com
949-723-5424 x306
 
Welcome to Scuba Board!

I am an Orange County Coastkeeper diver and love it for so many reasons!

You may want to move this thread to the So Cal Forum of California Kelp Divers where it will receive more exposure to those in your geographic region.
 
Ick, another volunteer organization has fallen prey to AAUS. It must be for the "scientific diving" argument. I'm curious, will you guys be requiring future participants to be AAUS members, or just have the rescue and advanced certs? Do you have your own training and checkout programs for your volunteers, or is it farmed out to a university or dive shop? What was the underlying motivation and/or pressure to fall under AAUS auspices? Do such members make up a large percentage of your current volunteers?

I find AAUS incredibly fascinating on a variety of fronts (I'm a non-AAUS scientific diver), and would be keenly interested in your reply comments.
 
And welcome to SB. :wavey: Put us in your Favorites and check in often.

Good luck and best wishes on your noble projects. Need to repair as much as what we've destroyed as possible, to be sure - and it's too bad about the government.

I'm off in Cozumel this week :D tell you about it later...


don
 
Hello,
No, we don't require anyone to be AAUS- just rescue and advanced. Yes, we train our divers ourselves and check them all out before they can start volunteering with us. We are joining AAUS for legal reasons, they've been able to show that their divers are more safe. Also when we move past pending status to organizational, we will be able to AAUSify our volunteers and they'll have that reciprocity to take with them to other scientific programs. No, we don't have that many AAUS divers, about 10-20% of our volunteers. However, those divers are some of our most qualified and reliable.
I'm also curious, what bad experiences did you have with AAUS? What kind of science diving do you do?
We'd love to have your help if you're interested in helping the kelp.
Thanks, Heather
 
I'm jealous! I worked in Akumal, Mexico for a summer on pollution and it's effect on the reefs. We went to Cozumel for a day and it was incredible!
Thank you for the welcome,
Heather
 
I was really not good at sciences...Maybe, this will be the opportunity to redeem myself?
 

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