World Oceans Day Beach Clean-up

SAAMBR Post

World Oceans Day Beach Clean-up

SAAMBR staff were joined by learners from Ridge Park College, Pitlochry Primary, members of the Radisson Blu Committee, locals and visitors on the uShaka Beach to celebrate World Oceans Day by picking up litter.

The uShaka Beach section of the Durban promenade was buzzing with enthusiastic ocean ambassadors who managed to collect 34 bags of litter in a very short period. Often when we look at the beach it appears to be clean but when we look really closely, we notice thousands of small plastic nurdles in and on the sand. This wonderful group of ocean ambassadors managed to pick up in excess of 1200 nurdles in just 2 hours.

Thank you everyone who joined the World Oceans Day Beach-Cleanup – we look forward to seeing you at the next beach cleanup planned for September.

ORI Hosts Training Workshop

SAAMBR Post

ORI Hosts Training Workshop

Last week, ORI hosted a training workshop on data analysis as part of capacity-building for the WIO-Benth project being led by ORI.

Over the past four years, WIO-Benth has been accumulating information on offshore seabed habitats and faunal communities in the Western Indian Ocean, and the time has come to pull the various data sets together to produce biodiversity and habitat maps for the region. Assisted by experts from the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, the workshop examined preliminary outputs of several analytical community/habitat models, and debated the limitations of the data as well as the interpretations of the findings.

Apart from the South Africans, there were participants from Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Madagascar. WIO-Benth is funded by the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association; project outputs will eventually be housed by the Nairobi Convention, and will assist WIO countries with Marine Spatial Planning.