Diving into science and conservation: recreational divers can monitor reef assemblages

Abstract

Overfishing, pollution and global changes threaten reef ecosystems all over the world and several conservation actions emerged to reduce and mitigate such impacts. Citizen-based programs with hands-on conservation experience and voluntarily data collection are a successful way of involving society in the conservation process. We developed and tested a citizen-based monitoring protocol to monitor reef fish and sea turtles during regular recreational diving operations, with minimum impact on the routine of the diving company. We compared data collected by volunteer divers and by trained scientists using this protocol, and assessed the influence of the volunteers´ diving experience in data collection. We found that recreational divers were able to record all the species included in the monitoring slate, providing estimates of species abundance and composition that did not differ from those obtained by trained scientific divers using the same protocol. This method also recorded large reef species, such as rays, sharks and turtles more effectively in comparison to traditional scientific surveys conducted in the same area. Such difference indicates complementarity between the citizen-based monitoring protocol and traditional scientific monitoring methods. The diving experience of recreational divers did not affect their ability to characterize reef assemblages and most volunteers provided a positive feedback of their experience as citizen-scientists. Therefore, recreational divers can be powerful citizen-scientists and implementing similar monitoring protocols in reef areas, particularly in marine protected areas where diving activities are allowed and regulated, seems feasible and a good way to engage divers in data collection and marine conservation.