Community / Islanders and tourists could help project to protect wildlife around Fair Isle
A COMMUNITY driven project to protect the seabirds, marine life and mammals around Fair Isle hopes to involve islanders and tourists in collecting its data.
The Fair Isle Marine Research Organisation (FIMRO) was established in 2018 and manages the demonstration research marine protected area around the island.
Its work includes using acoustic devices to monitor passing cetaceans such as orca, Risso’s dolphins and porpoises and monitoring seabird populations.
The need for a group like this was established in the 1980s, when people in Fair Isle started to notice a decline in the isle’s natural resources including visiting seabirds and inshore fish populations.
With the birds a crucial draw for visitors coming to the island, and a major boost to the island’s economy, a community-led group was made up of community representatives, the island’s owner National Trust for Scotland and the Fair Isle Bird Observatory.
It was christened the Fair Isle Marine and Environment and Tourism Initiative (FIMETI), the driving force behind the campaign for better protection of Fair Isle’s seas, which was later to be replaced by FIMRO.
Research officer for the Fair Isle Demonstration and Research MPA (DR MPA) Katie Cubbon said it was the “first community-led designation of its kind in Scotland”.
“FIMRO lead the project on the ground in Fair Isle now,” she told Shetland News.
“We have four volunteer trustees on Fair Isle, and the fundamental goal is to demonstrate and research the relationship between Fair Isle’s marine resource and the maintenance of the island community.”
Cubbon, who lives in Orkney, visits Fair Isle between three and four times a year.
On her last visit in June – which coincided with the visit of Shetland News to the island – Cubbon was there to support a masters student who had been brought onboard by FIMRO and NatureScot to work with the acoustic devices used to monitor cetaceans and analyse the data.
She said that a “key goal” of the project was to ensure that the data they find is “fed back to the community” of Fair Isle.
“We try to make sure that there are people coming in to speak about the research that is going on,” she said.
“It’s the community in partnership with the steering group that have defined the priorities for the project so it’s important that the research findings are communicated back.”
Cubbon joined the FIMRO project two years ago, and said the thing that stood out to her about the job was how central the people of Fair Isle were to it.
“I was really inspired by the work FIMRO and the community had done already,” she said.
“My background is in marine biology, so what drew me to this job is that I can still work in marine research but it’s not me directly leading the research, rather working in collaboration with partner organisations and supporting FIMRO and the DR MPA steering group to achieve their research goals.
“The variety of research that is going on is really interesting.”
That variety of research includes annual inshore fish surveys, which UHI Shetland have lead on, along with a recent sand eel survey – the first time in 25 years that data has been collected around Fair Isle.
Seabirds such as shags were also fitted with GPS tags last year to find out where they are foraging, something that helped influence the inshore fish survey.
“We’re still in the early stages of the research and in the baseline data collection phase for many of the research projects,” Cubbon explained.
“You see the importance of continuous monitoring as we have seen inter-annual variation in some of our surveys, for example the inshore fish survey which is now its fourth year, which suggests the environmental conditions and aspects such as prey availability may be changeable each year highlighting how complex the marine environment can be.
“It shows how important long-term monitoring is.”
FIMRO is also trialling having a seasonal education officer based in Fair Isle, and Cubbon said there was work ongoing to get local people more involved in data collection as part of the Fair Isle DR MPA project.
She said they hoped to “gauge community interest” in being more involved in citizen science and data collection, with the prospect that visitors to Fair Isle – including to the new bird observatory – could also help out.
Having never visited Fair Isle before taking the job with FIMRO, Cubbon said what she loved most about the island was its people.
“The community are so warm, friendly and welcoming,” she said.
“There are some incredible people on the island, and they have so much knowledge and interesting life stories to tell. “I grew up on an island, on the Isle of Man, and I live on Orkney now, so island life just appeals to me.”
She also thanked the Shetland Islands Council coastal communities fund, which has funded her post.
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