PEOPLE who love the UK’s coastline are being invited to help make history by being part of one of the largest coastal marine citizen science projects ever undertaken.
The £1.7m Capturing Our Coast project, funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund, is designed to further our understanding of the abundance and distribution of marine life around the UK. The Herefordshire-based Marine Conservation Society (MCS), is running one of seven Capturing our Coast hubs, which aim to, with the help of volunteers, find out more about the species that live on our shores and how we can protect them.
The MCS Bristol Channel hub will be collecting coastline data from Pembrokeshire in South Wales, round to Somerset and down to North Devon. It hopes to bring on board volunteers from the Severn Estuary-bordered counties of Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire as well as landlocked Herefordshire. Leonie Richardson, MCS CoCoast Project Officer, says she hopes the project will help us better understand how coastal ecosystems in the region respond to change: “The Bristol Channel region is characterised by dramatic scenery with rugged cliffs, striking headlands, rocky shores, sandy bays and estuarine mud flats. The combination of these diverse habitats, the influence of the Severn Estuary and the meeting of warmer Gulf Stream water with the cooler waters of the North Atlantic make the region home to some of the rarest and most spectacular marine life in the UK.”
Led by Newcastle University, the project is a national collaboration involving the universities of Hull, Portsmouth, Bangor, the Scottish Association for Marine Science, the Marine Biological Association of the UK and MCS. It also involves a number of organisations including Earthwatch Institute, the Natural History Museum, Northumberland Wildlife Trust, Cefas and the Coastal Partnerships Network. The project, which launched this week, aims is to recruit and train over 3,000 volunteers UK-wide.
“This is the first project of its kind and an exciting opportunity for anyone with a fascination for marine life and a desire to make a real impact on our understanding – and ultimately the protection of our coastal environment,” says Dr Heather Sugden, Co-Principal Investigator based at Newcastle University. “The data we collect will fill key knowledge gaps such as geographic species distributions, movement of warm water species, and occurrences of invasive non-native species.”
If you would like to be a part of this exciting project exploring the amazing British coastal wildlife in the Bristol Channel region, please register your interest at www.capturingourcoast. co.uk. No experience is necessary – training and support will be given and web-based options are available if access to the coast is an issue.
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