Yukon Marine Life Survey

Ocean Sanctuaries now offers an opportunity for advanced San Diego divers to contribute to a citizen science survey of the abundant marine life that has accumulated on the Canadian destroyer ‘Yukon’ since its sinking off the coast of San Diego to be an artificial reef in 2000.

In the year 2000, the City of San Diego in collaboration with the San Diego Oceans Foundation, purchased, cleaned and deliberately sank a 366 foot-long Canadian warship called the Yukon to act as an artificial reef and attract local marine life, a task at which it is been spectacularly successful.
In the 15 years that the Yukon has been sitting on the bottom off the coast of San Diego, it has attracted dozens of species of local marine life as well as a revenue-generating attraction for tourist divers from around the world.

The first scientific study of the marine life on the Yukon was undertaken in 2004 by Dr. Ed Parnell of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in collaboration with the San Diego Oceans Foundation. It utilized data gathered by local citizen science divers to generate an initial baseline study of the marine life species on the ship. 1

It too, will utilize local divers as citizen scientists to systematically gather data about the marine life species that have accumulated on the ship since 2004.

The Yukon lies in 100 ft of water and is considered an advanced dive and should not be attempted except by those who have the proper training.

Please Note: OS uses iNaturalist as our citizen science data collection tool. Please set up a free user name and log in to iNaturalist before proceeding.

For more information on getting started with iNaturalist, see here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started

Project Link: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/yukon-marine-life-survey

For those who are interested in assistance in using iNat, we have also set up a generic iNaturalist Facebook page devoted to more experienced user mentoring less experienced users in using this tool:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/inaturalistcs/