Cleaning up the coastline

GARDEN ROUTE NEWS - For International Coastal Cleanup Day on Saturday last weekend, residents all along the Garden Route came together for this worthy cause and devoted their time to make a difference to our marine environment.

Spearheaded by Ocean Odyssey, BioWise, Sanparks honorary rangers and the Knysna Basin Project, teams gathered at five points around the Knysna estuary, while Sanparks marine ecologists Kyle Smith and Clement Arendse also braved the icy waters and dived for trash.

Similarly, another group cleaned a part of the Wilderness beach that is managed as part of the Wilderness section of the Garden Route National Park, and was accompanied by local marine biologist Mark Dixon.

Arendse offered the following facts on the seagrass beds of the Knysna estuary:

It is South Africa’s most important seagrass site.
The 355–420 hectares of Cape dwarf-eelgrass estimated to be present there (Maree, 2000; Bandeira and Gell, 2003; CES, 2009) comprises over half the total national area of seagrass.
Both the Cape dwarf-eelgrass (Short et al., 2007, 2011) and the fauna that it supports at Knysna are of very high conservation importance (Hodgson and Allanson, 2000; Russell et al., 2009), contributing to the estuary receiving the highest ranking in terms of its ecological importance.
Seagrass beds can be quite dense, excluding other plant species and can extend up over the upper shore to (and occasionally beyond) the extreme low high-water neap tidal interface with the salt marshes.
Biodiversity within the seagrass beds is highest along the main estuarine channel in the marine-influenced region and declines upstream and towards the sheltered shoreline of the estuary.

Sea Scouts full of pride after the bags of trash they collected.