A year or more ago, I was browsing the GUE website, and ran across mention of this. There wasn't a whole lot of information, but the premise was intriguing.
The idea is that, because diving is for many folks a cyclic activity, we have a problem with shifting baselines. What I mean by this is that people get into diving, dive for a few years, and drop out of the sport. (I have read estimates that the average lifespan for a diver is about five years.) Each new diver is entranced by what he or she sees, but often hears older folks say, "You should have seen it when . . . " Although there may be (and probably is) much truth in this, no one really knows, because there is no good documentation of "how it was".
Project Baseline is an ambitious concept. The idea is to try to document the underwater environment, tied to Google Earth, in a way that makes the observations both publicly accessible, and available for comparison. Although, at the moment, most observations are in the form of photographs, video and narrative, the plan is eventually to be able to store numerical data such as visibility measurements, water quality assays, fish counts, or whatever information can be tabulated to characterize the particular environments.
In Seattle, we have begun a chapter of Project Baseline, and although it's in its infancy, I can say that it is proving to be enormous fun and a way to bring divers together with a shared purpose. Our second project dive, yesterday, saw 15 people show up in a snowstorm to try to do an underwater site survey. We ran into some obstacles (and there is clearly a sharp learning curve in doing this kind of thing) but we had a ton of fun and learned a great deal. I don't think it will be long before we are generating solid information to be uploaded and made generally available.
For those of you who think this is a poorly veiled recruiting pitch for GUE . . . there is no requirement that divers be GUE-trained, or even DIR-style, to create and maintain a Project Baseline. All that is necessary is to contact GUE and arrange to get the manual and some specific software and a little bit of training, and you can be up and running as your own project. The GUE divers in the Netherlands probably have the best developed PB going, outside of Wakulla Springs, and they recently celebrated the formation of the first entirely non-GUE chapter there.
If you find this idea interesting, please feel free to write to me, if you like, and I will share our experiences. Or you can contact GUE PB coordinator, Vanessa Belz, about how to get something going.
We got people out and diving, even in a winter storm . . .
Taking reproducible data encourages building good diving skills and teamwork.
And did I mention this is also just, plain fun?
The idea is that, because diving is for many folks a cyclic activity, we have a problem with shifting baselines. What I mean by this is that people get into diving, dive for a few years, and drop out of the sport. (I have read estimates that the average lifespan for a diver is about five years.) Each new diver is entranced by what he or she sees, but often hears older folks say, "You should have seen it when . . . " Although there may be (and probably is) much truth in this, no one really knows, because there is no good documentation of "how it was".
Project Baseline is an ambitious concept. The idea is to try to document the underwater environment, tied to Google Earth, in a way that makes the observations both publicly accessible, and available for comparison. Although, at the moment, most observations are in the form of photographs, video and narrative, the plan is eventually to be able to store numerical data such as visibility measurements, water quality assays, fish counts, or whatever information can be tabulated to characterize the particular environments.
In Seattle, we have begun a chapter of Project Baseline, and although it's in its infancy, I can say that it is proving to be enormous fun and a way to bring divers together with a shared purpose. Our second project dive, yesterday, saw 15 people show up in a snowstorm to try to do an underwater site survey. We ran into some obstacles (and there is clearly a sharp learning curve in doing this kind of thing) but we had a ton of fun and learned a great deal. I don't think it will be long before we are generating solid information to be uploaded and made generally available.
For those of you who think this is a poorly veiled recruiting pitch for GUE . . . there is no requirement that divers be GUE-trained, or even DIR-style, to create and maintain a Project Baseline. All that is necessary is to contact GUE and arrange to get the manual and some specific software and a little bit of training, and you can be up and running as your own project. The GUE divers in the Netherlands probably have the best developed PB going, outside of Wakulla Springs, and they recently celebrated the formation of the first entirely non-GUE chapter there.
If you find this idea interesting, please feel free to write to me, if you like, and I will share our experiences. Or you can contact GUE PB coordinator, Vanessa Belz, about how to get something going.
We got people out and diving, even in a winter storm . . .
Taking reproducible data encourages building good diving skills and teamwork.
And did I mention this is also just, plain fun?
