Dr Sally Carson

After a lifetime studying coastlines and rocky shores, Sally Carson still finds magic in every beach visit.

“It never ceases to amaze me what you find when you slow down, and you really stop to look. Every walk is always different,” she says.

The Canadian-born marine biologist and self-professed sea star and seaweed enthusiast loves watching others find that same joy and passion for their local shorelines.

“It’s always fascinating what people remember. Like, when you hold up some kind of starfish, and you talk about how it eats it dinner, or reproduces. People remember those fun facts,” she says.

Sally is the Director of the New Zealand Marine Studies Centre at the University of Otago and has dedicated over three decades to marine science education since moving to Aotearoa in 1991. The Centre engages more than 16,000 students, teachers and whanau members in a wide range of marine experiences and educational programmes each year.

Her work has spanned numerous marine education projects, notably the Aquavan, a travelling education programme, and Marine Meter Squared, a national citizen science initiative on long term monitoring of New Zealand’s seashore.

“Marine Meter Squared is a passion project of mine, and it’s about getting communities and schools to get involved in long term monitoring of their local shorelines. They are the ones that are walking it day after day. They know it best, and they have a role to care for it,” she explains.

The exercise involves using a marked-out meter square, where anyone can observe and record the animals and plants within that area and input that data to an online system which gradually maps an area of coastline over time.

As a basis for he rPhD  thesis, Sally never anticipated the project would be so popular, but says the exercise truly opens people’s eyes to the life on our shorelines and in turn sparks curiosity about the role each species in the marine ecosystem.

“New Zealander’s know so much about their plants on land, yet they’re less informed about the gardens in the sea. Seaweed, for instance is incredibly important. Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from the plants in the sea,” she says.

Participants can use Sally’s pull-out  seashore guides, to help identify endemic and introduced species including sponges, anemones, sea stars, shrimps and crabs, barnacles, pāua, mussels, oysters, fish and seaweed. These guides have been distributed to schools nationwide and were so popular that Sally followed up writing a book. Now in its second edition, The New Zealand Seashore Guide, provides further information on the ecology of seashore life.

“The data is also shared with scientists, and we get students in the community to do photogrammetry, which is knitting together a 3D image of the shoreline. So, in ten years’ time when we have new questions, we’ve got this permanent record of what the shoreline was like,” she says.

She genuinely loves her work and gets a “real buzz” out of sharing knowledge, especially with communities who underestimate the importance of what they observe.

“When people think of the word ‘science’ they think it’s scary and don’t want to have anything to do with it. But really, they’re doing science every day. Every time they walk in the environment and notice something, they’re doing science,” she says.

The Aquavan is a project focused on creating awareness and understanding of the connectivity between river health and the coastal environment, involving a vehicle with a recirculating seawater system and live marine species.

It’s an education tool used to spark interest and engages with communities and schools to explore their local environmental issues and discuss what they can do to help their surrounding natural ecosystems.

Sally has also championed science learning through programmes for students, teachers and the wider community. ‘Sign of the Sea’ is a recent project that is designed to hone peoples observation skills. A series of 5 min activities build people awareness of their local environment and how they can care for it. And she has just returned from Tonga where she has been working alongside teachers and teacher trainees to use the ocean as their classroom.

In recent years, the scope of her work has widened, and she now leads the outreach for Coastal People Southern Skies, a National Centre of Research Excellence, focused on connecting, understanding and restoring coastal ecosystems through research, local action and new pathways to learning.

As part of this Kaupapa, alongside Live Ocean, Sally and her team have partnered with waka voyaging groups and schools around Aotearoa, weaving citizen science into the learning programmes with hundreds of rangatahi youth directly benefitting. A kete of science-meets-mātauranga activities have been developed to connect more rangatahi with the moana and provide them with tools to monitor its health. By providing waka groups with the science kit and empowering them to deliver the programme, the long-term goal to scale up this citizen-science is being realised. These kits are also being rolled out to boat clubs around the motu as part of Yachting NZ’s  Moanamana programme.

“I think collaboration in any environmental issue is essential, as well as collaboration in education. she says.

By working with environmental groups, schools and scientists Sally says everyone becomes engaged with their local environments and together can make a difference.

“The biggest thing that I can do as an individual, is to get other people excited, interested, and passionate about their local environment. That way they’ll want to look after it too.” she says.