The Access Foundation awards first environmental grant to aid restoration on the Great Barrier Reef
The Access Foundation is proud to announce that a £5,000 grant has been awarded to Reef Restoration Foundation (RRF) to fund training to upskill a team member to commercial diver.
Access Senior Technical Support Engineer Richard Riles, who is based in Cairns, Australia, volunteers for RRF and introduced their work to The Access Foundation.
RRF was established in 2017 following widespread coral bleaching and operates across three sites in Tropical North Queensland, including Fitzroy Island, Hastings Reef, and Moore Reef. Corals have been damaged by warm waters and adverse weather affecting the salinity of the water at the restoration sites.
Due to Health and Safety regulations, some divers must hold an ADAS Commercial Diver certification to work on underwater structures, such as coral spawning trees. The funding means that a third diver employed at RRF will hold the appropriate qualification, enabling RFF to up-scale the coral nurseries much faster and at a lower cost.
In addition, the third qualified diver enables changes to spawning tree stocking practices, which means trees can be stocked much faster. The additional qualified diver is essential to initiatives designed to preserve precious corals because regulations require a minimum of three qualified divers for certain types of underwater structure alterations.
“With an additional commercial diver on the team, coral spawning trees can be stocked 10 times faster because the tree branches can be removed and stocked with new corals on the surface. …This will help RRF scale up the coral nurseries quickly and bolster the ability of nearby reefs to recover following bleaching events.”
Richard’s duties as a volunteer include assisting the RRF commercial divers in stocking and maintaining the spawning trees. Corals in the midwater nurseries grow five times faster than on the reef. They reach sexual maturity in about half the time, and they produce more eggs.
It is currently estimated that each spawning tree will produce about four million fertilized larvae every year. Each nursery is stocked with a wide range of species and the team works to a strategy to ensure genetic diversity within each species. There are currently more than 50 midwater nurseries with many more to come as the program develops.
In addition, Richard will be part of the team that lowers the coral nurseries into deeper, colder water to help them endure periods of warmer water, to preserve spawning stock and turbo charge reef recovery with species and genetic diversity when it is needed most.
Richard commented:
“With an additional commercial diver on the team, coral spawning trees can be stocked 10 times faster because the tree branches can be removed and stocked with new corals on the surface. Then the only part of the stocking that needs to be done underwater is re-attaching the branches. This will help RRF scale up the coral nurseries quickly and bolster the ability of nearby reefs to recover following bleaching events.”
Ryan Donnelly, CEO, Reef Restoration Foundation added:
“The marine heatwave of 2023/24 has been declared the fourth Global Coral Bleaching event since 1982/83 and caused coral bleaching across three-quarters of the Great Barrier Reef and a large swathe of area to the south, all the way down to Middleton Reef near Lord Howe Island, which is the most southerly coral reef in the world.
As the threat to coral reefs intensifies, our aspirations to mitigate the damage and assist adaptation must be bolder, and we can’t do that without building capacity within our team. The Access Foundation funds mean we have another skilled diver on board which will boost our progress and ultimately reef recovery.”
