Talk:Sandwatch

At its core, Sandwatch is a grassroots network of schools and community groups working together to monitor and conserve their beach and nearshore environments and to build resilience to climate change. Coordinated by the Sandwatch Foundation, a non-profit, non-governmental organization, and supported by international organizations including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Sandwatch has grown from its early beginnings in 2001 in the Caribbean to being active in more than forty (40) countries worldwide, including islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and coastal areas of Africa.

Each Sandwatch school or group adopts a local beach and regularly takes a series of measurements and tests of their beach using simple and easily available off-the-shelf equipment. By measuring how the beach width, currents, waves, water quality and other factors change over time, ideally a year or two, the teams can determine if their beach is stable and healthy or stressed and deteriorating, and the nature of the stressors. A Sandwatch climate change database, presently under design, will be operational by 2010 to provide an inventory of beach data against which climate change impacts can be assessed.

Once a problem has been identified by the group, they then mobilize their community to take steps and develop a small project to address and mitigate the problem(s). Project activities might include alerting the media to potential problems such as water contamination (from sewage or agricultural runoff for example), conducting beach clean-ups, replanting mangroves or dune stabilization vegetation, creating signage for proper beach use, monitoring and protecting marine turtle nesting sites, or monitoring the effects of coral bleaching. By keeping the beach and related ecosystems healthy they are more resilient and better able to adapt to climate change.

Each group is encouraged to be innovative and proactive in addressing the specific issues confronting their local beaches and communities.

All Sandwatch groups are encouraged to regularly post their data, photographs and other project details on the Sandwatch website, as well as contribute articles/photos to the Foundation’s news journal 'The Sandwatcher', that is published several times per year in English, Spanish and French language editions.

In addition, Sandwatch representatives from each country are invited to participate in regional and international workshops and conferences to share their experiences and data and to forge partnerships with similar environmental groups. Video conferences between teams and contests of various kinds are also regularly held to create and enhance an active and dynamic sense of community.

Pdiamondnevis (talk) 18:22, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

An explanation of the above post: this section was added onto the talk page in error by User Pdiamondnevis when he was first constructing the article. Invertzoo (talk) 14:07, 6 May 2009 (UTC)