Established in 1996, the Reef Check Foundation is an international non-profit organization dedicated to marine conservation. Reef Check (RC) has received numerous international environment awards for its work including the Global Environmental Prize from CMAS, the World Underwater Federation in January 2000, the Chevron Award in August 2001 and the NOAA Environmental Award in December 2001. Internationally the Reef Check program, with its community-based monitoring protocol, is already active in over 80 countries and territories.
The goal of Reef Check is to conserve marine environments through monitoring, education, research and management.
The RC technique is designed to allow amateur divers to judge marine communities health. Information produced is simple, quantitative and, if carried out regularly, can be used to assess broad-scale general trends.
Reef Check monitoring system is widely used because it is practical, non-destructive, and relatively quick and easy.
A major Reef Check activity for IYOR 2008 was the International Declaration of Reef Rights. The purpose of this pledge is to highlight the high value of coral reefs and to encourage all people and governments to support coral reef conservation. Reef Check would like to present the Declaration along with a list of one million names to all coral reef country governments in January 2009.
We hold regular Reef Check training courses. Reef Check trained members are able to carry out Reef Check surveys, either by volunteering on one of our project lead yachts or by doing a repeat survey on one of our established transects.
CoralWatch is an organization built on a research project at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. They have developed a cheap, simple, non-invasive method for the monitoring of coral bleaching, and assessment of coral health. The Coral Health Chart is basically a series of sample colours, with variation in brightness representing different stages of bleaching/recovery, based on controlled experiments.
The most obvious sign that coral is sick is coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is the whitening of coral due to a loss of symbiotic algae living within the coral tissue. In healthy coral, algae supplies energy and provides colour. During bleaching events, coral expels the symbiotic algae from their tissue which changes the colour of the coral. As coral expels more algae the coral becomes lighter in color. This loss of the ‘nutrient factory’ in corals may lead to death of the coral or the coral may slowly recover.
Localised events of coral bleaching can be induced by a variety of environmental factors: increased or decreased water temperature, exposure to ultraviolet light, changes in salinity or exposure to chemicals. However, the mass bleaching that occurs over large geographical regions can be caused mainly by an increase in water temperature over extended periods of time together with increased level of ultraviolet light.
OceansWatch members can help the University of Queensland answer critical questions about coral bleaching and recovery patterns as well as the duration of bleaching events in order to discover and implement ways to protect coral reefs from drastic decline.
To obtain a colour chart and learn the OceansWatch's methodology for CoralWatch please email operations@oceanswatch.org
