Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Keeping A Logbook--Part 2
When I moved to Alaska, I had more than 1,000 dives under my weight belt. As to activities undertaken on any one particular dive, my dive log book would provide nary a clue. I confess a certain laxity in keeping a log book. I record most dives as a single line of code on a sheet I keep on work file on the computer’s hard drive. Just the bare essentials--date, place, elapsed time of dive, maximum depth, purpose of dive and dive buddy. Most of the time my sheets record the purpose of the dive with a single work like “exploration,” “recreation,” “training,” and so on. In fact, except for describing the purpose, my Suunto dive computer with its three pages of displays for each dive does a more thorough job of keeping track of my past dives than I ever did! Investing in the interface to transfer the data from the Suunto to my desktop computer would just be a waste of software. Were it not for the requirement to keep a log in order to maintain my research diver certification, I believe that I would have abandoned the practice 20 years ago.
My lack of interest in keeping the record should not be taken as a criticism of those who do. On trips I keep a very extensive journal which goes far beyond the contents of any dive log. These diaries are more akin to writers note books than dive logs and they contain my running commentary on the experience. I know people who produce wonderful field notes on the natural history of every critter encountered. I am not one of those folks.
These detailed logs have become part of the "grey literature"--observations recorded but never published. The grey literature is finding application in countering a phenomena known as shifting baselines. When scientists record and publish the data, it becomes the "baseline" of the census of the reef, by which all future changes will be measured. The problem arises in that the baseline does not reflect recent changes in the reef. For example, a census of Yellowbanks off Santa Cruz Island would reflect the absence of pink abalone in the area. Yet, detailed logbooks from the 1980s would reflect a healthy ecosystem and home to dozens of pink abalone. As such, these detailed logs are important in putting the initial baseline into context and reflecting a shift over time.
My lack of interest in keeping the record should not be taken as a criticism of those who do. On trips I keep a very extensive journal which goes far beyond the contents of any dive log. These diaries are more akin to writers note books than dive logs and they contain my running commentary on the experience. I know people who produce wonderful field notes on the natural history of every critter encountered. I am not one of those folks.
These detailed logs have become part of the "grey literature"--observations recorded but never published. The grey literature is finding application in countering a phenomena known as shifting baselines. When scientists record and publish the data, it becomes the "baseline" of the census of the reef, by which all future changes will be measured. The problem arises in that the baseline does not reflect recent changes in the reef. For example, a census of Yellowbanks off Santa Cruz Island would reflect the absence of pink abalone in the area. Yet, detailed logbooks from the 1980s would reflect a healthy ecosystem and home to dozens of pink abalone. As such, these detailed logs are important in putting the initial baseline into context and reflecting a shift over time.
# posted by covediver @ 10:43 PM 
