REEF CHECK
AN ECO DIVER IN KELP FORESTS:
MY EXPERIENCE AT THE ANNUAL REEF CHECK CALIFORNIA RETREAT BY DANIA TRESPALACIOS, TROPICAL PROGRAMME DIRECTOR
This past week, Reef Check held its annual Reef Check California (RCCA) Retreat. It was the first time that I participated as the Tropical Director. I came away with a tremendous sense of pride at what Reef Check has accomplished and new excitement for the potential for all Reef Check teams worldwide. I want to share my stories and ideas from the retreat with the whole Reef Check Family. We met at Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve. If you search for it on Google Maps, you will see about five roof tops, surrounded by vast forests and an undeveloped coastline, about 80 km away from the nearest town. Big Creek Reserve is owned by the University of California Santa Cruz in the middle of Big Sur, a massive stretch of the central California coast blessed with rugged forested cliffs that plunge into the Pacific Ocean, with a single paved highway meandering between beaches and cliffs. Big Creek Reserve is closed to the public, accessible only to educators and researchers. Directly offshore of the Big Creek Reserve lays the Big Creek State Marine Reserve as part of California’s Marine Protected Area (MPA) network. RCCA, together with the University of California Santa Cruz, University of California Santa Barbara, and Humboldt State University, is monitoring this MPA network for the State of California and has surveyed the Big Creek MPA for over a decade. Big Creek is remote, rugged, beautiful and special, and I was happy to be invited. 22
DIVERS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT | JUNE 2019
The RCCA staff travelled to Big Creek from both ends of the California Coast. The three Regional Managers are the equivalent of Tropical Course Directors: they recruit and train volunteer divers (their EcoDivers), train Instructors (their Trainers), lead surveys and represent Reef Check at management meetings and all sorts of events.Tristin McHugh heads the North Coast, Dan Abbott heads the Central Coast, and Selena McMillan heads the South Coast. They are joined by Katie Kozma, the Southern California Training Coordinator, and Kate Vylet, the Climate Change Research Coordinator. In addition to leading trainings and surveys, Katie runs RCCA’s Youth Education EMBARC Programme, and Kate runs RCCA’s climate change research programme. Together with our Executive Director Jan Freiwald, and Reef Check’s supporting rock Jenny Mihaly, this crew works with more than 350 trained volunteers to survey more than 100 sites a year throughout a state with 1,350 km of coast line. It is very impressive that this seemingly skeleton crew continues to grow the number of sites and volunteers yearly. At the retreat, this crew meets in person to improve RCCA’s survey programme, discuss ongoing projects, and prepare for this year’s new monitoring season. The group discussed new species that would be added to the protocol, new monitoring sites approved by the State of California, and even a future expansion into neighbouring states.The RCCA
staff had a great deal of questions for me, too: How many fish species do you count in the Tropics? Who trains the Trainers, and how do you make sure that EcoDivers keep up their monitoring and identification skills? How is the data collected shared with headquarters, and who uses it? How can we bring the California and Tropical programme groups together? The RCCA staff had great ideas – there is much that the Tropical programme can learn from California, and I am excited to work more closely with them in the future. After two days of staff strategising, it was time to greet the Instructors. They have been chosen by RCCA staff to lead surveys and teach volunteer divers on their own. They, too, came from all over state – the prize for the longest commute goes to Dawn Bailey and Kevin Stolzenbach, who each travelled about 725 km from San Diego. The Instructors had varied backgrounds – construction, farming, theatre, engineering – but all shared a fierce love of diving, California’s marine habitats, and Reef Check. During the classroom sessions, there were lengthy discussions about how to instruct volunteer divers to count abalone accurately, and how to best mentor divers that need improvement in their survey skills. And there were discussions on the state of California’s kelp forests, and what Reef Check is doing to help protect them. Tristin McHugh gave a presentation on how kelp forests are under threat from exploding sea urchin
