Over the years, we've told you about the reef audits, comprehensive reviews of the condition of the reef. But we've only seen the finished product, today we found out how it's done by field biologists. Today we spoke to a group of them before they headed out to Sergeant's Caye for coral reef monitoring under the umbrella of the healthy reefs initiative:
Dr. Melanie McField - Marine Biologist
"The point for us is that we do the report card of the health of the reef every other year and we use the data collected by our partner organizations including NGO's and Fisheries Department and the University of Belize. So those are the groups that are here that are doing the training."
Jani Salazar - ERI. UB Research Field Technician
"We do a lot of monitoring out at Turneffe Atol, so me coming here and getting this training is so that I can go back to my organization and help share this knowledge with the people that I work with so that we can go back and do the monitoring, this kind of monitoring at Turneffe. It's been really interesting and again educational because the methodology isn't one that we've done before so to learn new strategies and new means and implementing these monitoring projects - it's been really good. From what I've been seeing it looks healthy and they have a lot of fish and a lot of herbivorous fish that the reef needs."
Henry Brown - Fisheries, Marine Biologist - Bacalar Chico
"For me it gives me an opening of an eye in the sense of knowing which algae is most dominant in the reef itself and knowing what there actual take on the reef is."
There are 13 trainees in total and they worked all this week.
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