Can citizen science move into the marine environment? (photo credit: Iggy)
Whether conservationists are studying wildlife on land or in the oceans they come across the same big problems and that is lack of resources and tight budgets. Increasingly ways are being found to involve the public in undertaking wildlife or species surveys. Now a recent study involving recreational divers shows that they can be a useful resource for elasmobranch studies.
Elasmobranchs – sharks, rays and skates.
Elasmobranchs are sharks, rays and skates, increasingly they are becoming threatened and conservationists have protection of many of the species high on their priorities. But within tightening budgets how do the conservationists and politicians know that actions such as banning shark finning and no take zones are working.
A study by Dalhousie University, Halifax, in Canada looked at the role that recreational divers could have in assessing shark populations and discovered that they could be a valuable tool for scientists.
Recreational divers as citizen scientists.
Recreational diving is a growing hobby around the world. The world’s largest dive certificate awarding body PADI issues 900,000 certificates to new divers each year with over 300,000 advanced certificates being awarded. With growing numbers of people taking to the water understanding how to take advantage of the divers is an important task for marine researchers.
Recreational diving is totally different from research diving. Recreational divers undertake roving dives – where they just randomly swim around – while researcher dives are very organised along transects or using quadrants – obviously much more methodical. It’s obvious that people diving for fun are not going to be willing to confine themselves to strict methods.
Recreational divers can provides useful shark data.
The study though discovered that roving dives can produce valuable data. While roving dives can not give sound data to calculate absolute density or biomass the dives can give good estimates of occupancy and relative abundance. Recreational divers also had increased chance of spotting rare species as they were not constrained to transects and could move freely in the water column and across greater ranges. Simulations found that roving divers could detect the fish at much lower densities than the more scientific methods. The increased detection rate was more pronounced with slower moving or stationary fish such as clown-fish.
Experienced and inexperienced divers can be useful citizen scientists.
The study also found that inexperienced divers (less than 20 dives) were just as effective at observing sharks than divers with over 500 dives under their belt. The difference between the counts of inexperienced and experienced divers were not significant. There are 187 sharks and 216 rays and skates species that live within the dive range of recreational divers.
The researchers concluded that using recreational divers can produce accurate reports on trends for both long term and broad based studies. The study suggested that large scale citizen science projects such as ebird could also be used in marine research. The results that these large scale studies can produce could give an important indication as to the overall health of a species. The results could also help to determine conservation strategies and locations.
External sites:
PlosOne: Assessing the Value of Recreational Divers for Censusing Elasmobranchs.
ebird.org.
