Year 2

3.16.11

Happy 2011 everyone! (It seems like the year just started but somehow it’s March already…) As we knew it would, the pace of our second year of service has really increased and we find ourselves constantly busy with work. Our projects right now are helping to strengthen the management of a village fish sanctuary and creating a Coastal Resource Management Plan for our town.

A fish sanctuary is an area of the sea designated as a no-fishing/no-take zone, which allows coral and fish to grow undisturbed. The long-term goal, then, is increasing fish stock and protecting coral habitats for food security, but for our limited two years here, we see these sanctuaries as a tool for mobilizing the community around their resources.

Coral reef protection might not seem like the most pressing need in a country facing poverty, disease, and overpopulation, but without the reefs, there are few fish. And without the fish, this country is facing a serious food security crisis. Some projections are showing that most of the reefs will be gone by 2050 and fish catch is already in rapid decline, so action is needed now if the next generation is going to have enough food.

[Manapag Reef Fish Sanctuary boundary markers]

In our town there’s an island village that has been managing a fish sanctuary for four years now. The community managers of the sanctuary are very active, enforcing the no-take area by apprehending fishermen who try to fish inside the sanctuary illegally. They do this on a completely voluntary basis. Because they have few resources at hand, they’ve asked us for training and assistance to improve their sanctuary and make it fully operational.

[village education event - community members watching videos about healthy coral reefs]

[5 fishermen attended a coral reef monitoring training that Brandon put together. After a day of lecture indoors, the team went out to the reef and surveyed the coral, fish, and seagrass]

The project started in November and will continue through August, at least. Our main activities are helping the community write a management plan for the sanctuary, train community members in coral reef, fish census, and sea grass monitoring, rating the sanctuary’s current management level, enhancing the physical infrastructure (guardhouse, buoys, signs, etc) and doing environmental education events. We’ve just submitted a grant for funding through PC. If approved, this will fund construction of a guardhouse for the sanctuary as well as law enforcement equipment. It will also help fund a community celebration we’re planning in the village called “Reef Day,” which will be held together with the village’s annual fiesta in May.

[Tori works with the Management Council to review the current status of the sanctuary]

[Brandon works with the Monitoring Team to make a "transect grid" - a rope grid laid on the reef to help determine the amount of coral that is alive. Fishermen are masters at knot tying, obviously, and made a 300 sq. meter grid in under a half hour!]

It’s a cool project for us to work on together, because we can each use our unique strengths – Brandon is focusing on the snorkel trainings for fishermen and construction projects. I’m working on the grant proposal and management planning with the community, and we work on education events together.

[After the survey, the trainees tabulated their observations and came up with these results. This info will be used by the community to design new management strategies for the reef. Until now, the group has had no information to guide their decision making. Now they know where they are and where they need to go. They will use this info as the baseline to track and evaluate the progress of their resources in the future.]

We’re in the first phase of the CRM Plan project, which is compiling info on the current status of resources and community opinions. So for the next three months Brandon will be doing habitat surveys of mangrove forests, coral reefs, and sea grass beds alongside community trainees. I’ll be holding a series of 10 community meetings with my coworkers in the agriculture office to gather socioeconomic info and comments and ideas from community members. We’ll compile all of this and use it to write Coastal Environmental Profiles of 10 villages. From that, we’ll work with our counterparts in the local government to write a 5-year coastal resource management plan. Our goal is to have a draft submitted to the mayor by October. Until then it will be a very busy few months!

[the very active Manapag Reef Fish Sanctuary Management Council!]