Daintree's Hidden Coastline...My First Earthwatch Expedition!

At the beginning of June I embarked on my first Earthwatch expedition. Earthwatch always sends one Earthwatch staff member on every expedition as a Team Leader. The Team Leader is in charge of logistics during the trip, making sure everything is running smoothly, as well as ensuring that everyone is getting along and is happy. My boss Cass was going on this expedition in June, but wanted to bring me along so I could learn how to run these expeditions since she wants me to be a team leader on my own for several expeditions starting in September. I was thrilled to be able to come along, since it’s an amazing experience and I got to see a part of Australia I probably wouldn’t have otherwise…and it was all paid for by work! It’s times like these that I realize how lucky I am and what an incredible job I have. This expedition was a 10-day expedition on the Daintree River, looking at the health of mangroves. It was a corporate learning team and all of the participants were emloyees of the National Australia Bank (NAB), one of our corporate sponsors. Most of our expeditions are open to the public, and people from all over the World come on them, but this one was a bit different. It was only open to NAB employees, and they had to apply and interview for a spot on the expedition since there were only 18 places. We ran 2 trips back-to-back with 9 participants on each one. Our CEO David was the team leader for the first team and Cass and I were the team leaders for the second trip.

Cass and I got up at an ungodly hour on the morning of Friday June 6^th for our 6 am flight to Cairns, in Northern Queensland. Once we got to Cairns, we picked up the mini-bus we had rented and drove into town to meet the team. We then all drove 2 hours to get to Mossman Gorge, where we participated in a Kuku Yalangi Dreamtime walk. The Kuku Yalangi is the indigenous group living in Mossman, and they run a rainforest centre that leads walks through Mossman Gorge. This is an incredibly beautiful area, with stunning streams running through the rainforest and an incredible gorge. It used to get hundreds of cars driving up there every day for tourists to do self-guided walks. The indigenous people of the area were worried the pollution from the cars and the huge numbers of tourists were destroying this pristine area, so they built a tourist centre and made it so that every tourist who wants to come to the Gorge needs to park their cars at the bottom and take a bus up there. They also hired local guides to do “Dreamtime tours”, where they talk about the history of their people and their connection to this environment. The buses have reduced the number of people that can be up there every day, as well as drastically reducing the pollution from cars. The Mossman Gorge Centre also almost exclusivey hires Indigenous people to work there, so they have provided many jobs to locals, as well as protected the environment. We had a great guide Rodney, who took us on a lovely walk and taught us a lot about the plants and animals in the area, as well as the uses and significance they have for the Kuku Yalangi people. At the end of the tour we went to a crisp (aka very cold!) stream and had a little swim before heading out.

Rodney teaching us about the indigenous body paint

After the tour we drove farther north and had to cross the Daintree River on the ferry then drive about 30 minutes along a beautiful windy road beside the ocean to get to our accommodation in Cow Bay. We stayed at Daintree Crocodylus Village, which was eco huts in the middle of the rainforest. It’s a really cool place to stay…all of the communal areas are outside under tarps. There’s a lounge area with couches where we would have our meetings and debriefs at the end of every field day, as well as a dining area with long tables where we would eat breakfast and dinner. We had 2 eco cabins, split by gender. We stayed in eco huts with a tarp as the roof and walls and bug nets around the bunk beds to keep all of the rainforest creepy crawlies out. It was amazing to be staying right smack in the middle of the rainforest. It took us a while to get used to sleeping there since it rained every night which was very loud on the tarps, and there were so many animal noises! Definitely not a quiet sleep but it was very soothing.

The eating area at Crocodylus

One of the eco huts

On the second day of the trip, we had several morning sessions where the scientists, Norm and Jock taught us all about mangroves, their importance and what the research would be. We learned how to identify some of the many species of mangroves in Australia, which proved very useful once field work began. That afternoon, we drove down to the Daintree River and met Mick, our boat driver for the duration of the expedition. Mick is a tour guide on the Daintree River, where he takes tourists out on his boat to see saltwater crocodiles, snakes and birds that call the river home. We took a leisurely cruise on the river, where Mick pointed out tons of colourful birds, several tree snakes, many huge saltwater crocodiles and a blossom bat that was pollinating the flowers of the apple mangrove (this was an extremely exciting find because these little bats are very rare to see…Norm has been working in mangroves for over 30 years and has only seen 2 in his life so we were extremely lucky!). It was a good opportunity for Norm to identify some of the mangrove species we had been learning about that morning, further preparing us for the field work to come.

A Northern Tree Snake

Lizzy the croc!

The adorable blossom bat!

Day 3 of the expedition is when the real fun began, aka getting down and dirty in the mangroves! We had 5 full days of field work, with one day “off” in the middle. The schedule of the field work days was similar throughout the week, with the times adjusting slightly every day due to the tide times. We had to make sure we were in the mangroves during low tide, or the water would be too high for us to work in the plots, and the crocodiles would be able to swim into the plots, which was obviously against our Occupational Health and Safety policies! The days were extremely busy…definitely not a vacation! We would get up around 7 every morning, and have breakfast which was a choice of cold (yogurt with the most delicious tropical fruit and muesli) or hot (bacon, eggs and toast). We would then prepare the field equipment, arrange ourselves into teams for the day and decide who would be doing what tasks, then douse ourselves in 40% deet bug spray (which was the most important step in my opinion since the mosquitoes and sandflies in the mangroves were terrible!). We drove down to the river where Mick and his dog Jetta would be waiting for us on the boat, and we would head to our site for that day. We would do the field work until around 4 then would head back up to Crocodylus. We would have 15 minutes to clean all of the muddy equipment, throw all of our muddy and wet clothes in the washer and dryer, shower, then we would reassemble at the couches to enter all of the data we had collected that day. Of course before the data entry began we would make a quick pit stop at the bar to grab a well-deserved beer after the hard and long day of field work! We had 5 laptops and would partner up with one person reading off the field sheets and the other person entering it into their computer. We would then eat dinner around 6:30. Every day we had a choice between 4 or 5 meals that would change daily. The food was awesome! We had curries, pork chops, pastas, chicken dishes, ribs and many more delicious home-cooked meals. After dinner we would assemble in the lounge area again and finish the data entry then would have a debrief about that day, where we would share pictures and stories from the day. It always ended up being quite the laugh since funny things always seemed to happen to people in the field. It was a great way to end the day…we all felt proud of the work we accomplished that day and it was fun to learn about funny and interesting things that had happened to people throughout the day. Some evenings if we finished data entry early we would all play cards together and hang out. Everyone bonded so quickly and we had a great time hanging out together. We would all go to bed completely exhausted but very happy J

The Daintree River

Now I’m going to explain in more detail what I mean by “field work” and what we were actually doing every day. Every day we went to a different site and collected all of the data from that site. Each site had 3 plots in it (for example site 1 would have plots 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). All of the sites were at different places along the river, which meant they all looked completely different due to the species of mangroves in them. Mangroves are trees that can live in estuarine environments, which means they can tolerate both salt and fresh water. Different species have different tolerances for saltwater however, so there were different species at the mouth of the river where the ocean met the river and the salinity was highest, versus kilometres up the river where the river was mostly freshwater and had a much lower salinity. We had sites all along the river so we were exposed to many different mangrove environments and therefore a wide variety of species. The species look very different…some of them have roots that are completely underground, and some have huge stilt roots that make it very difficult to walk amongst them. We called the plots with the stilt roots the “jungle gyms” since you had to climb over and under them to get around. The soil in mangroves is completely water-logged and therefore very anoxic. This means that all of the species have neumatophores, which are breathing roots that stick up aboveground, allowing the plants to access oxygen from the air. It made it very difficult to walk in the mangroves…it added an extra challenging element to the field work which I had never been exposed to in the terrestrial forests that I’ve previously worked in.

Two species of mangroves-the one to the left has stilt roots and the one to the right has buttress roots.

 

A plot where we have tagged the trees-you can see the breathing roots sticking up from the ground

Earthwatch has been running this expedition for many years, so we were returning to re-sample plots that have been sampled every year for the past few years. The data we collected would then be compared to the data to previous years to see how much these mangrove plots are changing, as well as to make the data more statistically significant due to the repetition. Mangroves are EXTREMELY important ecosystems for many reasons, but governments often only see them as stinky, muddy, buggy environments with no purpose, and mangrove forests often end up being completely destroyed and their land developed on. Mangroves provide us with many ecosystem services that many people are unaware of including being nurseries and habitats for commercial fish and prawns, trapping sediment to protect coral reef and seagrass systems and sequestering carbon (mangroves store fifty times more carbon than terrestrial ecosystems).

So as you can see mangroves are really crucial ecosystems and we need to be trying as hard as we can to protect them! Especially now that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is becoming such a problem and is accelerating global climate change. Why would we be destroying areas that sequester so much carbon and could play a huge role in decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels?? So spread the word people…we NEED mangroves! This is why Norm and Jock have such a passion for mangroves and are trying to learn as much as they can about them to influence governments to stop bulldozing them for developments. The research we were doing was looking at the condition of the mangroves plots after a large-scale disturbance, as well as performing blue-carbon (carbon that is stored by aquatic environments) budgeting. Cycone Ita went through this area about 6 weeks before we had been there, and the Daintree River was flooded with water up to 12 m above sea level in some areas of the river! We were studying how the mangroves have fared after these floods by conducting live and dead tree counts, measuring tree girth, height and overall health and assessing whether there was any debris (sticks and other things that would have been deposited in the trees from the flood waters) in the mangroves due to the floods. It was crazy because some of the trees had debris 8 m above the ground, but other than that you could barely tell that there had been water 8 m high in that plot only 6 weeks before. It really showed how resilient these trees are. If a terrestrial forest had that much water go through it, there would be many dead trees and it would be quite obvious that there had been a disturbance there.  We were also performing SVAM which is shoreline video assessment monitoring. This means we would go in the boat with a video camera and cruise along the shore taking videos and commentating on the condition of the shoreline. This is an initiative called MangroveWatch that Norm and Jock started , and the idea is to have video footage of every kilometre of mangrove shoreline in Australia for consecutive years so that the shoreline condition can be compared every year, to determine whether there has been erosion, storm damage, etc. If they can prove how resilient these shorelines are, then they can help influence governments to protect rather than destroy the mangroves. It’s a perfect example of citizen science since people all over are Australia are taking their video cameras out in boats and doing the filming for Norm and Jock then sending it in to them to analyze. There’s no way just the 2 of them could film all of it every year, so they need dedicated citizens to help. It was really cool to be a part of it and to see it in action! If you want to learn more about MangroveWatch, then check out their website: http://www.mangrovewatch.org.au/.

Another major task that we were doing was the blue carbon budgeting. They want to determine how much carbon these forests are actually storing in the soil beneath them. We were taking 4 core samples of every plot. We were describing the soil in the samples (colour, texture, whether there were roots and what size those roots were, etc) and then we would take samples of the soils at several depths which will later be brought back to a lab and tested for the carbon content. Again, they are trying to gather more data to show how much carbon these soils store, to prove how important they are. So there’s the gist of the field work we were doing. It rained basically the entire time we were there, which made for some pretty unpleasant field conditions. We were constantly soaked, completely covered in mud and continuously attacked by bugs, but we had an incredible team and everyone took it like champs! It was amazing to see a bunch of bankers working in these conditons. Most of them have always lived in cities and work in the corporate world, sitting at their comfortable desk chairs in dry and temperature regulated offices. It could have been a miserable trip if they complained, but everyone was so passionate about the important work we were doing, and the whole team was committed and dedicated to the tasks for the entire week! We got through it by dancing, singing and working together as a team, and we all ended up having a lot of fun despite the rain, mud and bugs.

One of the participants recording data in a plot

Another extremely important part of this expedition was that we were teaching the NAB employees about Natural Capital so they can bring this back to the bank and hopefully come up with a strategic plan to roll natural capital into all of their future decision making. Natural capital is the world’s stocks of natural resources, including rocks, soil, air, water and all living organisms. It is a form of capital that businesses deal with daily, but have largely taken for granted in the past, and this is something that we are trying to change. Before the expedition, Cass and I had contacted people from the tourism and agriculture industries in the region as well as the local council, to see if they would talk to our groups. We wanted them to teach us about the natural resources they both depend on and impact, and the challenges they face when trying to balance the environmental, social and economic factors in their business. In the middle of the expedition we had a “non-mangrove” day where we drove into Port Douglas and met with the local council there. The region we were in relies heavily on the tourism industry since they have the Great Barrier Reef and rainforest there so many people come to explore those. The agriculture industry is the second biggest industry in the region however, and it is very hard to balance these two, since agriculture often as negative impacts on the environment, and tourism depends on the environment remaining pristine and “untouched”. It was great for the participants to hear about how all of these industries depend on and impact ecosystem services and the many trade-offs between them. That afternoon we went on a sailboat tour out to a set of islands called the Low Isles. We heard from the sailboat operator (someone within the tourism industry) about what they do to be sustainable and the challenges they face in terms of natural capital. That was the relaxing part of our trip since we got to hang out on the sailboat until we got out to the islands, then we snorkelled at the Great Barrier Reef for a few hours which was incredible! We were so lucky because it had been raining for the entire expedition so far, but on our day out to the Great Barrier Reef we had a hot and sunny day, which gave us a little “vacation” in the middle of our trip. After we were done snorkelling, we got a tour around the Island by the couple that live there. They are the only people who live on the island and they are 100% sustainable! They are completely off the grid, meaning they don’t rely on power generated from Port Douglas and they don’t even use generators. They use solar power, which they store in batteries and they are very conscious of the energy they use. They turn everything off once the sun goes down and they don’t turn things back on until the sun comes out in the morning. All of the water they use is rainwater and they have composting toilets. It was so fascinating and inspiring to learn that people really can live this way if they are dedicated to it. We then got back on the sailboat and enjoyed a canapé of gourmet finger foods as well as a glass of champagne as we sailed back to Port Douglas as the sun set over the ocean. It was incredible and it was one of those days when I couldn’t believe this was my job and I was being paid to do this! When we got back to Port Douglas, we met up with a NAB business banker and her client who is another tourism operator in the area. We all met over dinner and they talked about their reliance and impacts on the environment and how the bank can help their clients to be more sustainable. It was an incredibly long day, but was a nice break from the field work and was a lot of fun to be out on the ocean and to go snorkelling at the reef.

A view of Low Isles from the sail boat

 

The sunset on our way back to Port Douglas

The next 3 days were field work, and on the second last day of the expedition (the day before everyone flew home) we made sure all of the data had been entered properly and was put onto a USB stick then we had the rest of the day off! Cass drove us all an hour and a half north to Cape Tribulation, which is a small town in far north Queensland. They have many nice beaches there, and we got to explore these beaches, go for a nice lunch then swim in a creek (that we all hoped didn’t have crocodiles in it). We were so lucky, because it was our second non-mangrove day of the expedition, and it was the only other day that didn’t rain! We got to enjoy the sunny and warm weather on the beach and in the creek. It was a great way to reward ourselves after a long hard week and a half of field work! We even saw dolphins swimming around close to shore at Cape Tribulation Beach...what an incredible end to the expedition! That evening they kept the bar open later than usual and we had an end of the trip party! Earthwatch had bought champagne for the team so we had champagne and drinks from the bar and looked at everyone’s top 10 photos from the trip. We reminisced about how much fun we had had and how much we had all learned. It was so heart-warming to see how close everyone had become over those 9 days and how people’s perspectives on the environment and what they can do both in their personal and professional lives had changed.

Cape Tribulation beach

 

One of the dolphins that made a surprise visit!

The NAB employees now have a project that they’re working on that they’ll have to pitch to some senior employees of NAB at the end of August. Both of the teams have to come up with their own pitch of how NAB can incorporate natural capital into their business plan and how they and their clients can become more sustainable and environmentally aware. The best parts of both projects will be chosen to make a natural capital strategic plan that will be used nation-wide across the bank. They will be using the people and industries who met and talked with us as case studies to work on this project. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with, because if the banks are committed to becoming more environmentally conscious, then they will only invest in companies and industries that have this focus as well and they will be able to influence many other industries and sectors.

It was an amazing experience, and we all learned so much about natural capital and the challenges we face when trying to value the natural resources we use, as well as the importance of mangroves and how we can help protect them. I got to meet some incredible people from all over Australia and got to experience a part of Australia that I otherwise would not have. Getting back into field work made me realize how much I love and miss it and it made it hard to get back to the office again. But seeing how this expedition has changed these people’s lives and inspired them to take what they have learned and apply it in their professional and personal lives to make them more environmentally conscious and responsible has made me so proud to work for Earthwatch and I feel more deciated than ever to work hard for this organization. I believe the work that we’re doing can really make a difference! I am now extremely excited for the next expeditions I will be going on starting in September because if they are anywhere near as awesome as this one was, then they will be incredible experiences!