This is one of my most exciting project that I had ever worked with. It is the project that I feel strongly and positively about in the term of changing Cambodia. This project is where my heart’s home; it meets my expectation and passion throughout my whole life. The project is, called the “Study of Artificial Reef In Cambodia.” I have been falling in love and investigating about environment especially in Cambodia. I also had been studying about ecology with different kind of forests and the aquatic life. As a result, the decision that I made to participate in this remarkable opportunity is a nice welcome for my true passion.
I have been researching and working on this topic for about a year with my lovely partner, Soliday. She also has interest in this specific type of research, and it is the best to gather and share ideas. Due to the definition for an artificial reef, it means a human-made underwater structure, typically built to promote marine life in areas with a generally featureless bottom, to control erosion, block ship passage, or improve surfing. It was the start of our research of trying to understand what is an artificial reef? Furthermore, we did a further research about the artificial reef including the advantages, disadvantages, and the deploys of artificial reefs in other countries. This was the first round work for this research, and we ended writing a short report.
Project Name: The Study of Artificial Reef In Cambodia
Your Name: Venghour Than, Soliday Yon
Question:
| Is artificial reef gives a positive or negative impact around the world throughout the existing artificial reef? |
Background Information:
- General Infomation here
Artificial Reef:
In our research, we are trying to find many websites that provide us many helpful information as we can, linked to our main question is about the positive and negative effects of the artificial reef. Our team went in one report called “Artificial Coral Reefs as a Method of Coral Reef Fish Conservation.” This report is talking about community studies about the artificial reefs. Reference: http://scholar.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=honr_theses For your information, we haven’t look details about this report yet due to the limitation of time but we knew that they are doing a case study in Koh Tao that locates in Thailand about the experiment of making artificial reef in Koh Tao. |
Hypothesis:
According to the research on the general information on the point where it states
This shows that there are both side, positive and negatives points. We think that the artificial reef will give a positive impact on the marine environment. |
Data Charts:
We haven’t done any experiment or come up with an idea of design about artificial reef yet. But we can show you our data that we’ve been tracking on most of the work time. So this is our data with the lists of an artificial reef that are existing around the world. For some regions that have an artificial reef, there aren’t abundance of information that we want.
1. Location: Japan
Description: The Japanese are the world leaders in artificial reef technology for commercial fishery enhancement and have been creating artificial reefs since the 18thcentury; the materials used are of high quality like concrete, steel, and glass-reinforced plastic.
2. Location: USA
Description: In the USA, the artificial reef programs of many maritime states are run for the benefit of recreational sports fishing, (SCUBA) diving, commercial fishing, waste disposal, and environmental mitigation; the materials used are mostly waste, including concrete, rock, construction rubble, scrap tires, cars, railway carriages, and ships. Only Japan and the USA have a national development plan.
3. Location: Philippine
Description: Reference: http://pubs.iclarm.net/libinfo/Pdf/Pub%20CP6%2049.pdf
- Malaysia and the Philippines use waste tires to build many of their artificial reefs. The central Visayan Islands of the Philippines have known to use 1600 pyramid bamboo modules.
- The main purposes of Philippine’ artificial reef workshop are:
- Consider and evaluate all the negative and positive feature of artificial reef
- To make an existing artificial reef in Philippine
- To comment on and suggest alternatives and supplements to the installation of artificial reef
- These are the artificial reef ecological and socio-economic features:
- Habitat for fishes or other organisms
- Feeding, breeding and nursery area
- Reference point
- Discouraging to trawling
- Eco-tourism or other recreating purposes
- Waste disposal
- Mariculture
- Fishing ground
- Sanctuary
- Substitute for destroyed coral reefs
- Entry point for coastal management initiatives
- Focus for propaganda purposes of vested interest groups
- Replenishment area
- Provide a known and easily located fishing area
- These are all the benefit that get from artificial reef but there is a main negative part is people aren’t take care of artificial reef, they just leave it on the seabed.
4. Location: Australia
Description: Australian reefs have been built from materials of opportunity such as tires and redundant ships; these reefs are used primarily as a focus for recreational angling, and SCUBA diving.
5. Location: Taiwan
Description: In Taiwan many fishing vessels (made obsolete by government policy to reduce the size of the fishing fleet) were sunk to provide new habitats.
6. Location: Europe
Description: In Europe artificial reefs were pioneered along the Mediterranean coast in the late 1960s. At present, most reefs are still associated with scientific research. Italy, France, and Spain have been the most active reef-building countries since 1970. Spain is placing more artificial reefs into its coastal waters than other EU country. In 1991, Italian artificial reef scientists for the 1st time formed an inter-European reef group to encourage liaison between research groups and other association of the Mediterranean. Current initiatives include a network of European artificial-reef research to establish a coordinated direction for artificial reefs within the EU.
Results:
According to our research on many countries they’ve been studying and doing researching on an artificial reef, we have come up with results.
| Country | Result |
| Japan | Success and still working on it. |
| USA | Success (Not sure if they still working on it, recently) |
| Philippine | No information, need more detail. |
| Taiwan | No Information |
| Australia | Success |
| Europe | Their first reef has been success. |
We can see that there are two countries that didn’t detail their results in the end. The other four were success but some are not proven that they’re still working on it or they stop already.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, according to our research through this investigation, we fully agree that the artificial reef is a very beneficial, creative project and place to rebuild the ecosystem. We can see the beautiful organisms are starting to adapt to the artificial reef throughout the artificial reefs that are locating in other countries. Also, we know that we can build our own artificial reef out of the material that we can find around of our environment, like bricks.
Next Investigation:
After getting all these information, we are feeling confident to start to sketch our own artificial reef but we don’t know will it works yet. Also, we will start to look and research deeper of the condition of the sea or the location that we want to project our artificial reef. Paul said if can success this project maybe we can deploy our artificial reef in Koh Seh. Furthermore, we want to do a research on the coral reef fishes, in order to let us know what type species of fish we want to have in our artificial reef in the target.
All our References: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yuvmX2nRJ6xHqOhXef-9gi_u30dQrGD0Qoc8DqK5QOU/edit