Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Great Fiji Shark Count - Funds for Christine!


Please have a look at this page.

Christine has been with the GSFC since day one.
Like announced back then, she has so far worked completely pro bono whereas the little donor funding has been completely invested into print materials and necessary admin. Now in it's fifth year, this ground-breaking project has generated an enormous mountain of data from tens of thousands of dives all across Fiji and is rapidly nearing the stage where there is enough information to start discerning long-term population trends.

But for citizen science to be good science, there needs to be verification.
This means that in order to start her analytical work, Christine needs to (finally!) come to Fiji to personally witness and fact check the current, exceptionally tedious data collection process from recreational divers to dive operators all the way to Helen's painstaking verification and then, transcription into Excel spreadsheets.

Alas there are no GFSC funds left.
Nowadays, donors appear to expect instant gratification and with the GFSC being long-term monitoring generating only very sporadic and rather unspectacular interim results, donor contributions have slowly fizzled out. In fact, BAD have financed the last three counts out of cash flow as along with Kerstin's continued research into local Shark fishing, we believe this to be invaluable information for better managing Fiji's coastal Shark populations.

So there you have it - this is the back story.
Please, if you can, do make a contribution towards Christine's research.

Thank you.

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