Friday 17th October saw a visit to the Dunfanaghy Family Resource Office by Tom Hannigan a volunteer in the All Ireland Coastwatch Survey. Tom led a walk out to do the annual beach survey, from Dunfanaghy town pier, down Kill ,and onto Killahoey.
Hair-like green algae, blocks sunlight from plantlife.
Testing the waters as we went, the survey skills were imparted – what to look for, what to record and what was important for a complete survey of the coastal area. From bird life, to plant life – shells, seaweeds, algal formations, worm sign, starfishes, and much more the survey was done over the course of several hours. Of course rubbish and pollution were also noted and sample taken of water courses feeding into the coastal environment.
After a tough walk out trudging through wet sands, the work of importing the data to the Coastwatch.org website – a pan European Project developed to help conserve and notate the state of our coastline in Ireland and the rest of Europe.
The results and main takeaways of the coastwatch survey will be presented at a conference in Dublin later this year.
Hopefully the local coastline will get a relatively clean bill of health.
