Mission & Goals

Our Mission:

Project Baseline mobilizes citizen-divers to records change in the world’s underwater environments and to engage with scientific, conservation, and government entities to advance the restoration and protection of our natural and cultural treasures. 

 

What We Do:

Grassroots Engagement

    • Engage with divers (scuba divers, free-divers, & snorkelers) across the globe through our social media, article writing, and online video documentary campaigns
    • Engage with participants and teams to improve their documentation and collaboration efforts
    • Engage with researchers, other conservation organizations, and government agencies to identify and pursue collaborations that advance research, restoration, and protection efforts
    • Develop and maintain a freely accessible online database that stores and displays the data and images we’re collecting – check out our stats.

Collaborative Scientific Missions

    • Organize collaborative exploration and documentation missions with scientific, conservation, and government entities in areas around the world of critical importance.
    • Advance the work of our collaborators to understand, restore, and protect underwater environments.

Why We’re Here:

Too many of us are accepting as inevitable, the piece-by-piece destruction of the underwater environments we cherish along with the amazing animals that live there.

The baselines needed to define pristine, natural, or even acceptable environmental quality in the underwater world simply don’t exist. For the most part, the only baselines are the ones preserved in our memories and those baselines are shifting progressively downward as every generation accepts some decline as inevitable.

Unlike most terrestrial environments, underwater ecosystems lack the public visibility (the voice) needed to act on the alarming rates at which these environments are becoming degraded and destroyed.  We created Project Baseline to be that voice.

nveloping the origin of the Gulfstream’s northern flow in the most extreme point of the Florida Key’s (Dry Tortugas) to north of Port Canaveral, Florida and encompassing the entire Bahamas, Project Baseline’s Gulfstream Chapter is home to over 10-million people, the 3rd largest coral reef in world, a diverse 7-billion dollar economy and arguably the most influential “stream” on the globe. As divers we all know that as population has increased, the quality of the reef, fresh water supplies and fish population have declined in this region. Sharing “baseline” data with the other 99% (non-divers) of the population is the first goal on a path to assisting our citizens and leaders in developing sustainable policies, practices, lifestyles, progress, etc.

More than 95% of the Dry Tortugas National Park is underwater and has been well documented by academic dive/science programs for many years. This area is one of the boundaries for the Gulfstream Chapter of Project Baseline as start point for the Gulf Stream current entering the Florida and Bahamas. The SouthWest Florida shelf in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico is the primary feeder to the entire Florida Keyes and is the original spawning grounds for much of the marine life found in and around the Gulf Stream.

Less than 1% of the oceans are currently protected from industrial and residential developmental pressures, yet our oceans and fresh water bodies constitute more than 75% of the surface mass of the globe; this is in stark contrast to the 12% of land mass currently being protected today.  Project Baseline will assist to balance this ratio by efficiently providing compelling data to the public in an easily accessible, highly visible, graphic/image supported, open platform (Google Earth) and embracing the unstoppable power of the “citizen scientist”. We welcome input, collaboration and support from all.

About Project Baseline

Project Baseline emerged from an awareness that good science practiced in a vacuum is often useless toward effecting change. Yet, the most energetic and well meaning public or private initiatives can be disastrous without well developed and rationale evaluation. In other words science and public policy must be informed by a persistent assessment of existing and evolving conditions. By coordinating and presenting a global collection of environmental conditions, Project Baseline will develop a long term catalogue of environmental conditions; this library may be used to enhance public awareness, inform scientific inquiry and develop public policy. We hope you will become motivated to support our collective best interest and become part of this global effort to save our world’s most precious natural resources.

The Mission: Protect our world’s aquatic environments and the clean water supply on which they depend.

The People: Project Baseline is made possible by the dedication of a global cast of volunteers dedicated to preserving the world’s most precious water resources.

The Process: Project Baseline helps channel the passion of passionate volunteers, the capacity of dedicated professionals and the energy of concerned citizens.

The Goal: Enable conservation by developing awareness and expanding knowledge while describing and cataloging historic and present-day conditions.

About Global Underwater Explorers

For more than a decade GUE’s non-profit efforts have been focused on the exploration, education and conservation of the aquatic realm. Our global base of representatives support a variety of programs which help reduce environmental impact and organize the passion of concerned citizens while collaborating with governmental and non-governmental organizations to facilitate public awareness of and support for aquatic conservation.

 

Read more about Project Baseline in this flyer: Project Baseline