Atlantic Ocean: mapping mangrove forests in The Gambia

Under a worst-case scenario for rising sea levels, the tiny west African nation of The Gambia will lose all or most of its capital, Banjul, by 2100. For marine scientist Maiyai Hocheimy, hope lies in the mangrove forests of Bintang Bolong, the largest tributary of the Gambia River. Mangroves sequester carbon, help prevent erosion, shield coastal communities from flooding and serve as nurseries for commercially important fish species, but demand for food and natural resources has put pressure on The Gambia’s wetlands.

Hocheimy’s Perpetual Planet project will focus on mapping the country’s mangrove forests and communicating their importance to the public. “We really want to get the communities to understand the value of conserving the mangrove forest so that we can protect our capital,” she says.

Hocheimy and her team will also perform what could be some of the first hydrodynamic and bathymetric mapping in The Gambia, working with university students to train a new generation of scientists.

“I always say Gambia is like a blank canvas when it comes to research and we get to paint this canvas and make it as beautiful as we want it to be,” says Hocheimy.

Global: levelling the field for deep ocean exploration

Sixty-six per cent of the entire planet is deep ocean (below 200 metres), and yet less than 0.001 per cent of it has ever been seen with human eyes. That was the remarkable finding of a study by deep-sea explorer Katy Croff Bell, published earlier this year, that aggregated data from some 44,000 deep-sea dives conducted since 1958. Bell’s study also showed that our current understanding of the deep ocean is incredibly biased, with 97 per cent of those dives carried out by just five wealthy countries — the United States, Japan, New Zealand, France and Germany — and limited largely to their surrounding waters.

When it comes to managing the ocean and the many things we demand of it, this narrow perspective is problematic, says Bell, who founded the Ocean Discovery League (ODL) to make deep-sea science more accessible. “We’re making a lot of assumptions about the rest of the ocean that we haven’t seen yet, but also we’re not including the perspectives and questions of so many other people around the world.”

It would take “about a million years and a quadrillion dollars” to see the entire deep ocean, says Bell, so the ODL is taking a more strategic approach, identifying 10,000 sites to be visited within the next decade in order to provide a less biased and more representative understanding of the deep sea. At the same time, the Rhode Island-based non-profit is developing low-cost, easy-to-use tools for data collection and analysis, including DORIS, the Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System, a camera that can reach depths of 6,000 metres and costs less than $10,000 per unit.

Kristina Brown used another ODL innovation, the Maka Niu (“coconut eye”) compact camera system, to capture images at the bottom of Sherman Basin, hopefully answering another of the Gjoa Haven community’s questions: what’s down there?

While the data collection phase of her project is now over, Brown is excited to continue working with the community to interpret their findings through both a western scientific and Inuit lens. “I can’t underscore enough how much of this program has been like a constant evolving conversation with the community, which has made it really unique and really interesting,” she says. “We still have so many samples and data to go through that we really are just at the beginning of trying to figure out what it is that we’ve been able to uncover.”