I recently finished a two week stint on beautiful Maria Island, a national park off the coast of Tasmania, to work up the data collected in the first round of the Reef Life Survey co-run by Drs. Graham Edgar and Rick Stuart-Smith at the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. The Reef Life Survey network is a non-profit entity whose aim is to, “improve biodiversity conservation and the sustainable management of marine resources through the collection of high-quality biodiversity information at spatial and temporal scales beyond those possible by scientific dive teams.” They do this by utilizing a network of enthusiastic trained recreational divers who perform standardized transects at hard substrate systems worldwide. Currently there are slightly over 1800 sites in the network from Tierra del Fuego (50 S) to Svalbard (nearly 80 N), although a good number of sites are concentrated in Australia where the network was trialed over the past few years.

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