The ‘Beneath the Bay’ project, funded by the Port Phillip Bay Fund and VIC DELWP, has been striving to enhance a working partnership between key members of the Victorian recreational SCUBA diving community, through the Reef Life Survey (RLS) program, and Parks Victoria.
The project aims to continue vital long-term monitoring of Port Phillip Bay marine life, including Marine National Parks and Sanctuaries, through training of local recreational divers & Parks Victoria divers in the RLS biodiversity survey methods.
The Beneath the Bay project also contributed to the development of the Reef Life Explorer (launching November 2020), and the other online, interactive data exploration tools.
RLS divers and seastar aficionados rejoice! Following discussions with experts, two often indistinguishable Nectria seastar species have become one..
For the 11th year, a small but hardy RLS team made the trip to Port Phillip Heads in Victoria to re-survey our long-term monitoring sites around the Bay.
In February, a group of Parks Victoria and Reef Life Survey divers descended on Port Phillip Heads, Victoria to complete a tenth year of marine biodiversity monitoring.
