Un drone marin écoresponsable vogue en Nouvelle-Calédonie

This text presents and explicits the story of a marine drone: the Wave Glider, designed and developed by Liquid Robotics, an American company of the Silicon Valley. The text specifies its functioning, directly dependent on energies that are the swell and the sun and its technical characteristics authorizing a set of measures of in situ parameters (sea temperature, salinity, currents, marine acoustics, video but also meteorological data acquisitions). A set of scientific or operational applications is also introduced. A detail is supplied on the first experience led in New Caledonia: inaugural mission of the drone Wave Glider, property of the Company Assystem, for a route between Nouméa and Lifou and return. Several perspectives of use of such a tool in New Caledonia and in the Pacific are proposed.

International workshop on "Different survey methods for coral reef fish, including methods based on underwater video"

In September 2013, staff from the University of the South Pacific (USP) Honiara campus, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and IFREMER (UR LEADNC, AMBIO project) in New Caledonia, and the French Institute for Pacific Coral Reefs (IRCP) in Moorea, French Polynesia, co-facilitated a workshop entitled “Different survey methods of coral reef fish, including the methods based on underwater video”. The workshop was attended by students from USP, NGO and fisheries officers. They were trained to several underwater visual census techniques and to the STAVIRO video-based technique, including both field work and data analysis.