Monitoramento de ambientes recifais através do mergulho recreativo

• Autor(a) principal: Souza, Leonardo Rodrigues de
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRN
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufrn.br/handle/123456789/43297
• topic: Ciência cidadã; Citizen Science; Peixes recifais; Reefs; Turismo; Tourism; CNPQ::CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA

Reef environments are among the most productive and diverse ecosystems on Earth, but are also threatened due to overfishing, global changes and pollution causing biodiversity loss. To mitigate these threats, severe changes in the habits of the human society are needed. One way to promote this is through population involvement in monitoring activities and scientific data collection (citizen-science), disseminating scientific knowledge and stimulating the curiosity and commitment to preserve the environment. The present study evaluated a monitoring protocol for recreational divers who voluntarily monitored patterns of abundance of key reef fish species in a coastal reef of Rio Grande do Norte. The protocol has been applied during recreational diving operations of a local company, aiming to evaluate the ability of volunteer divers in identifying and counting key reef fishes to generate data for monitoring. During the same period, researchers conducted visual censuses of the fish community for comparisons. Even though the information collected by volunteer divers was relatively similar to the collected by the scientific divers, the community composition varied between the methods. This may have occurred because the volunteers were able to better detect rare species and species with greater mobility in comparison to the scientists, probably because 40m² transects may be a limiting factor to detect large animals and with greater mobility. However, the scientific diver was able to count some species more accurately than the volunteer diver, for example parrotfishes. Therefore, the protocol may be an efficient tool for detect rare species and species with greater mobility, monitoring and may complement traditional scientific methods. The simultaneous use of the two methodologies for monitoring may enhance our ability to detect subtle changes in the reef fish communities. The assessment made by the volunteers about participating in this research was positive and the levels of diving experience of the volunteers did not affect the data collected by them. Therefore, this protocol presents a high potential for replication in other areas.