RLS Lap of Australia and Sydney
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Reef Life Survey - Lap of Aus transcript
Sydney has
quite incredible marine life for a large
City. You see an awful lot
we have a few shark species that are
quite common here Port Jacksons and
Wobbegongs,
but my personal favourite are the
cephalopods, the
cuttlefish and the octopus.
I’ m John Turnbull, i'm the east coast
coordinator for reef life survey.
I learned to dive quite a long time ago
but then i stopped because i sort of
felt that there's not that much to see
where i live around home in Sydney.
You know it's a big city and i had the
view back then that you really had to
travel to other places
to see cool marine life.
In more recent years i started to get
back into diving and i realised no,
actually Sydney has quite
amazing marine life but i didn't really
know
what it was. I couldn't identify all the
fish species for example.
[Music]
I got involved in Reef Life Survey about
eight years ago.
I was doing research into the marine
environment and how
it is viewed by humans and the reef life
survey program was a great way for me to
get out in the water,
contribute to something positive, but
also learn myself about the species
and the ecosystem.
Here in sydney we
survey pretty much all year round
because we have a dedicated team of
volunteers and they just love getting
out in the water and they like doing
surveys.
So we have data coming in all year round
but it's a steady trickle.
Then once a year we try to really do
an intensive
session of a few weeks where we hit all
the sites as much as many sites as
possible and that means that every year we have
that big chunk of data that we can
compare year on year.
10 years ago they did a big circuit
around Australia using
a whole variety of small boats they
could get their hands on and shore
diving
and they studied about 500 sites all the
way around australia.
Fast forward now 10 years later thanks
to funding by the
ian potter foundation we're now able to
repeat that
and do what we're calling the Lap of AUS
[Music]
Here in Sydney that's about 40 sites
that we're coming back to.
Normally in a year we would survey about
25 but this year we're doing
the additional ones that maybe haven't
been done for 10 years
and that allows scientists to look at
that decade of change. What has changed
over the last 10 years
not just in Sydney but all the way
around Australia.
[Music]
But the other thing that we're seeing is
we're starting to see the impacts of
climate change
in Sydney as well, particularly on
kelp forests. So the kelp forests are
getting smashed by storms, they're being
affected by pollution, but also the warm
water coming down
on the East Australian Current. That
combination of factors is weakening the
health of
the kelp forests, they are are starting to thin
out
and look a bit sick and that has
flow on effects. You know those forests are
food and shelter for many species.
On land if there was a forest over there
and the trees were dying or the animals
were disappearing
everyone would know in this local area
whereas out here
under the water it's a bit out of sight
and out of mind.
To me the big hope that i have is that
the combined efforts of
hundreds of volunteers will give us a
much better
view of what's really happening with the
marine environment. If you don't have
that data if you can't show a trend
it's very hard to then argue the case
with managers and government agencies
that we should be protecting things.
So to me the big thing I hope
is much more data coming from all those
efforts.
Leading to much better decisions to
conserve what we have.
In 50 years time i'd like to think that
what we're doing contributes to
better protection and better marine life
you.
English (auto-generated)