Turneffe Atoll Sustainable Association, TASA, Benefits from Grant Funding from Government

Valdemar Andrade

The Turneffe Atoll Sustainability Association, TASA was one of the recipients of a grant. TASA is home to Caye Bokel, commonly known as the “elbow”, a multi-species spawning aggregation site. The atoll is a prime location to view sea sponge diversity, and TASA is involved in monitoring and managing a number of measures and their Executive Director, Valdemar Andrade spoke to the media about some of what they’ll be able to do with the grant.

Valdemar Andrade, Executive Director, TASA

“What we are doing is we are implementing technology solutions to be able to continue to do the work with respect to sustainable financing and sustain marine biodiversity protection. So the technology solutions that we are looking at are innovating our special monitoring and reporting tool to be able to have a more real-time access and real-time approach where it is kicking out analysis through a dashboard, um, so that we can, um, incorporate those into our enforcement plans, into our education plans, into our science plans, um, and into our tourism plans. And so, um, you know, we also looking at, uh, at that tourism, um, component as well to develop an app and to be able to ensure that we are able to track work, tourism stakeholders to know which part of the reserve they’re using that they’re using it sustainably because while they’re enjoying it and while they’re selling the reserve as a product, we want to ensure that they’re not damaging the very ecosystem that they’re, that they’re using. On the science side, we are also gonna be innovating the special monitoring and reporting tool to be able to put in place and capture catch data from the fishers within the tool. The smart also give us geo-referencing of that data so we know what is being catched by whom over time, and we are able to tell the commercial structure of that species or the structure of that commercial species you know, to be able to inform us whether the enforcement that we are doing is having impact and whether people are gonna be able to harvest for the foreseeable future.”