Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) has become the Hakai Institute‘s first partner in a new citizen science sea star monitoring program.
The Cortes Island Project
As Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI explained, “”We just launched a really exciting joint project with the Hakai Institute. They are monitoring Sea Stars in the Discovery Islands and we can contribute from Cortes Island.”
“Hakai is using a program called iNaturalist which allows you ere you can to go out, take a picture with your iPhone and upload it to the web. It is really easy. If you have downloaded the app, you can upload pictures while you are standing there.”
FOCI is also looking for volunteers to do monthly beach walks
“Once we have the volunteers, we will let them know about the low tide dates.and try to get them to record Sea Stars in a more methodical manner. That’s looking at both healthy sea stars and any sea stars that have the wasting disease,” said Hall..
Interested parties can email FOCI at [email protected] or phone 250-935-0087
Hakai is an outgrowth of the Tula Foundation, which purchased the Hakai Beach on Calvert Island in the Great Bear Rainforest during 2009. This became their first ecological observatory. A second observatory was set up on Quadra Island in 2014. The following year, the Hakai Institute’s corporate office opened in Campbell River. The Hakai magazine is based in Victoria and there is a Hakai node for Fisheries and Oceans at UBC.
According to Hakai communications specialist Kelly Fretwell, researchers on Quadra and Calvert Islands have been studying the Sea Star Wasting disease for years, but iNaturalist opened up the possibility of enlisting citizen scientists.
“It seemed like a perfect focal point to bridge community science in the Discovery Islands and Hakai’s work in sea star wasting and sea star monitoring … This is our pilot year in combining those two focuses. As a result we wanted to reach out and see what community groups would be interested,” said Fretwell.
Reaching out to community groups
Lannie Keller, from the Discovery Islands Ecosystem Mapping Project, introduced Fretwell to Sabina Leader-Mense. FOCI’s Marine Stewardship Coordinator.
“She already partners with Hakai on other projects, so it was a perfect link up. Sabina was super excited about this project. Then, early last Fall I did a short intro to iNaturalist with some folks from FOCI and the Wild Cortes partnership. We were talking about some ideas that might be of interest and they had some great ideas about how to apply iNaturalist to their work,” said Fretwell.
She has been communicating with groups like the Quadra Island Outdoors Club, BC Marine Trails Group, Maple Leaf Adventures and the Comox Valley Yacht Club, but FOCI is currently Hakai’s principal partner.
Fretwell hopes to set up some specific sea star monitoring dates on Cortes Island this summer.
“The nice thing about this project is we aren’t just collecting data and sitting on it. If you are out there doing the monitoring, you’ll get some feedback on what is going on in a few months time.” said Hall.
