General News
22 December, 2022
Busting ghost nets haunting the Great Barrier Reef
WITH giant ghost nets wreaking havoc on marine life and corals around the Great Barrier Reef, charity Tangaroa Blue Foundation has partnered with international technology company Satlink to launch a world-first program that uses satellite technology to tag and track ghost nets while retrieval teams are mobilised to remove them.
Satlink’s “Project ReCon” will allow for the repurposing of recovered echosounder buoys to track ghost nets entering the Great Barrier Reef and will be integrated into Tangaroa Blue Foundation’s ReefClean project.
“With our teams looking for ways to reuse and recycle international commercial fishing echosounder buoys retrieved from beach clean-ups along the Reef, it was very much a case of who you gonna call,” CEO of Tangaroa Blue Foundation, Heidi Tait, said.
“Turns out, Satlink was the ghost net buster we needed to speak with to be able to repurpose the buoys and divert them from landfill,” Ms Tait said.
Tangaroa Blue was the perfect partner to get Project ReCon off the ground, starting in Australia along the Great Barrier Reef early next year and then rolling out around Australia through the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) network.
“By working with international commercial fishing fleet partners, we can have the buoys recovered by Tangaroa Blue and their AMDI partners tested and reassigned to track ghost nets along the Reef,” Satlink’s Head of Science & Sustainability, Kathryn Gaviria, said.
“The technology also allows for virtual fences to be put around reefs providing notifications before nets impact critically sensitive areas,” Ms Gaviria said.
The Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef and Labor Senator for Queensland, Nita Green, has welcomed the project.
“This exciting new project by the Tangaroa Blue Foundation is a further step in the right direction to one day ensuring our waters are free from ghost nets. Well done to everyone involved,” Senator Green said.
As part of the program, Tangaroa Blue’s AMDI partners, which include Indigenous Rangers, tourism operators and commercial vessels, will deploy the buoys as part of their monitoring work.
“With lost or discarded ghost nets the size of football fields currently drifting unsupervised across the Great Barrier Reef, they are causing untold damage to marine life and fragile corals as they become entangled on reefs”, Ms Tait said.
“Having the buoys distributed along the Great Barrier Reef with AMDI partners means that if a ghost net can’t be removed, a buoy can be immediately attached and the net’s movement tracked in real-time by satellite until a retrieval team is mobilised.”
Implementing Project ReCon along the Reef will help reduce technological waste, reduce impacts on coastal environments and benefit the local Australian communities that find the echosounder buoys.
