Standards Development

Scope

This standard specifies the requirements for the training of citizen science divers. The standard shall have a broad scope so as to be applicable to all disciplines of science.

This document is applicable to all recreational divers independent of any scientific background (unlike the ISO 8804 standard series which a primarily directed at the scientific diving community).

A citizen science diver is competent in basic underwater scientific methodologies and protocols and shall be able to assist in scientific diving activities.

This standard will specify competencies, prerequisites for training, Introductory information, Required theoretical knowledge, Required practical skills, Practical training parameters and Evaluation criteria for training systems aimed at training citizen science divers.

Purpose

1. With an increasing number of scientific projects focusing on the marine environment and blue economy, scientific diving is becoming increasingly important.

This standard is aimed primarily at recreational divers without any scientific background to become citizen science divers and will set minimum requirements for the training of such divers. It will be beneficial, both to organizations involved in training scientific divers and recreational divers.

2. There is a huge potential for recreational divers to contribute to scientific projects. Very often these are associated with studies on environmental sustainability and the better recreational “citizen science divers” are trained, the more useful their data is.

3. For many years there have been multiple efforts to harmonise citizen diver qualifications throughout the world and especially throughout european countries. Currently there is no single global standard and frequently no mutual recognition of training and qualifications between organisations or countries. WG 1 has received multiple requests to draft a citizen science diver standard and already been assured the support of major stakeholders.

In a web-meeting held prior to the submission of this NWIP representatives of the major scientific diver stakeholders from around the world, unanimously agreed to go ahead with this project. So there is definitely strong political and stake-holder support for WG1 to produce a standard for citizen science diver training.