BRUV

Baited Remote Underwater Video

Ecological survey strategy

Introduction

Due to the difficulties of studying elasmobranch abundance in the wild, different techniques had to be invented in order to address different ecological questions.

One of these techniques is the Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV). This elasmobranch and predatory fish study method has been used in numerous studies around the world and has demonstrated great success

Ample data can be taken from these video assessments including population dynamics, diversity, abundance and behaviour

BRUVs offer a low environmental impact strategy to help understand changes in reef fish diversity over time.

Objectives

The BRUV project is part of our in house baseline data and ecological monitoring research to estimate and compare the relative abundance of predatory fish species, including sharks and rays, inside and outside of marine protected areas (MPA).

These species are also the most commercially valuable and play an important role in the ecosystem and in developing successful marine park management strategies

This project is standardised across our project locations to help create a comparative study from 3 variable survey locations and assisting in the establishment / improvement of MPA zoning requirements.