Recover ghost fishing gear and contribute to citizen science while at sea! – STM launch a new site for the nautical sector.
Spending countless hours at sea each year, what better community is there than the yachting community, to help protect marine life and monitor marine ecosystems?
Save The Med Foundation is launching a new, mobile based website aimed at the nautical sector, to share tools that enable sea farers to recognise, record and remove threats to marine fauna and help save entangled animals during their voyages.
The site, which can be reached by scanning the QR code in this article, provides clear instructions on how to save entangled turtles, something that might sound simple but is often done incorrectly and can actually result in the death of the animal after its’ release.
It shares information about Ghost Fishing Gear, a danger to both marine life and yachts, and provides instructions on how to recognise and remove it safely and record when, where and what you removed on an online form. This information is added to our data base and can be very helpful for NGOs and scientists that work for policy change.
The site includes a page with useful links that provide in depth information about the beautiful Sa Dragonera Marine Reserve. You can learn about the different levels of protection in the waters of the reserve, find out what you can and cannot do there and even where to book your buoy in Sant Elm.
You can also find links with informations about other marine reserves in the Balearics as well as a link to the Balearic Posidonia sea bed map.
If you feel like you, your crew or guests would like to get more hands on by conducting a beach clean up, you can find guidelines, information and an online data collection form (also downloadable as PDF) on the Citizen Science Clean Up’s page. The data that you upload helps Save The Med to identify key problem areas and work for the reduction of plastic pollution.
The Yachting community is in a perfect position to help preserve the very environment they depend upon, and the sector has so much to offer. Therefore we encourage everyone to visit the site by scanning the QR code in this article, saving it to your mobile screen as a button for easy access and consider how you could adopt some of the suggested actions with your crew and guests during your time at sea!
We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for additional content that you would like to see up there! Should you want to share your ideas, please email fiona@savethemed.org.
