The NAS is supporting the "Gathering Information via Recreational and Technical (GIRT) Scientific Divers" Programme being developed by  NAS Senior Tutor Andy Viduka. GIRT is a conservation focused no-impact citizen-science project.

Please do consider adopting your site under the GIRT Programme as well as the NAS Adopt a Wreck Scheme

Find out more here: https://www.girtsd.org/ 

The destruction of underwater cultural heritage (UCH) has increased rapidly in the last two hundred years mainly driven by direct and indirect impacts from people. However, with climate change and increasingly violent storm events, a site’s equilibrium with its physical environment is under potentially greater or new threats from natural events.

Gathering Information via Recreational and Technical (GIRT) Scientific Divers is a conservation focused no-impact citizen-science project. It aims to train members to systematically document observable physical and natural features of historic shipwrecks, submerged aircraft and other underwater cultural heritage in an open sea water environment, to facilitate their ongoing protection and management. The focus of the GIRT citizen science project is to enable better understanding of the condition of sites and the factors driving their preservation or deterioration. It also aims to encourage interested people to have an active and positive public archaeology role.

GIRT members (individuals, groups and businesses) ‘adopt-a-wreck’ that is of interest to them and agree to monitor the site using the GIRT documentation methodology at least once a year. Starting in the second year of observations, GIRT members compare their site data and allocate a ‘traffic light’ indication of threat to the site’s preservation (Green, Yellow, Orange, Red). GIRT member’s observations and threat assessments are shown on a map that will be located on the ADOPT WRECK page of this website.

Once the website development is completed, all the records from a survey will be:
•linked to the names of the GIRT members who undertook the survey and their adopted site; and
•compressed and made available for GIRT members to add to their site’s formal record in a statutory database.

For people living in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Australia that statutory database is the Australasian Underwater Cultural Heritage Database (AUCHD).

By being able to add GIRT monitoring records to the AUCHD, or any other statutory database, annual observations of a site’s condition will never be lost and GIRT member contributions will be permanently recognised. Also, promoting the democratisation of information, GIRT member contributions will facilitate a greater understanding of what is happening in our marine coastal environment from climate change and its impact on our underwater cultural heritage. Potentially, with enough GIRT members adding their individual observations, the GIRT citizen science project may be able to go beyond understanding a specific site's ‘equilibrium’ in the environment over time and obtain an understanding of what is happening more broadly to underwater cultural heritage – locally and regionally.

Through your participation in GIRT, you can assist others, to easily see the threats to your adopted site and if there are patterns to events occurring in the marine environment that may impact other nearby wrecks. Through these methods GIRT members can contribute directly to science-based decision making and potentially the prioritisation of activities by relevant authorities or appropriately qualified community groups to protect or undertake rescue archaeology of submerged sites.

In order to collect data on a site, members need access to a camera with an underwater housing, 30m tape, photography scales, slate and pencil and GIRT monitoring templates printed on waterproof paper (besides standard dive gear). Once data has been collected, GIRT members will be encouraged to compare their results with other members, lead the analysis of aspects of research (i.e. marine life, correlation of storm data with observed sediment movements, modelling observed change to other proximal sites…..) and present the results of their surveys or broader analysis of data at conferences such as the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology (AIMA) annual conference.

GIRT Scientific Divers is part of a PhD research project that aims to: better understand the motivation of divers. GIRT members are also asked to complete an anonymous 15-minute online survey to enable better understanding of who is interested to participate as a volunteer in this citizen science project and whether their motivation changes throughout the course of their participation. A survey monkey request will be sent to your email address on completion of training and again approximately two years later. Completing this short online survey will significantly help improve GIRT as a citizen science project and is appreciated.

So, if you are qualified diver over 18 years of age, passionate about preserving our shared underwater heritage for the future and love diving shipwrecks or submerged aircraft, then JOIN GIRT!