San Diego-based Ocean Sanctuaries Seeking Volunteers to Dive the Yukon Wreck, Submit Photos

Ocean Sanctuaries is announcing the 2015  Yukon Marine Life Survey--an opportunity for citizen science divers and underwater photography enthusiasts to contribute photos documenting the marine life on the Yukon over time. This is a long-term study (5-10 years) designed as a follow-up to the original, pioneering baseline study done in 2004 by the San Diego Oceans Foundations under the Artificial Reef Monitoring Projects (ARMP). 1

The 366 ft. long Canadian warship Yukon was purchased, cleaned and sunk by the City of San Diego and the San Diego Oceans Foundation off Mission Beach in July of 2000 to serve as an artificial reef  which would attract both tourists and marine life–and, in that regard, it has been spectacularly successful.

For more information on the Yukon, see here: http://www.cawreckdivers.org/wrecks/yukon.htm

Ocean Sanctuaries is looking for high definition, close-up [macro] photographs of the marine life present on the Yukon. For now, we are only documenting invertebrates which have recruited on the ship over time–fish will come later.

We are encouraging divers to simply do their dives as they normally would and photograph invertebrate marine life as the come across it, ie: sea stars, sponges, algae, etc.

Photographs of specific areas of the ship will be entered into  ‘Wildbook,’ a web-based application for wildlife data management designed originally for use with Whale sharks, by information architect Jason Holmberg 2 analysed by our PIs (Principal Investigators) and  compared  to assess marine life attachment on the ship over time. 

For more information on the project, see here: http://oceansanctuaries.org/wordpress/citizen-science-projects/2015-yukon-marine-life-survey/

1. Ecological Assessment of the HMCS Yukon Artificial Reef off San Diego, CA,  by Ed Parnell: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.dema.org/resource/resmgr/imported/S2R-2005-01-EcologicalAssessment-Yukon.pdf

2. Wildbook: A Web-based Application for Wildlife Data Management: http://www.wildme.org/wildbook/doku.php