Every month, a rotating team of Love The Oceans divers drops onto the same fixed transect lines across Jangamo’s reefs with a slate, a tape measure and a species list. What they bring back is one of the longest-running community-led reef monitoring datasets in Mozambique – and right now, it’s telling a story nobody wants to hear.
The reef is changing
Between 2018 and 2024, algal cover on our monitored sites doubled. Reef-fish biomass has dropped toward collapse levels over the same period – a direct fingerprint of unsustainable fishing, corroborated by the fisheries data our team collects on Jangamo’s beaches every landing day.
These numbers only exist because of volunteers. Marine professionals, students and citizen scientists join us on expeditions, train to a standard that lets us compare across years, and then contribute dives into the same dataset. Over four years we’ve tagged more than 1,000 hard coral colonies across 14 coral families and documented 16 coral diseases – the kind of baseline almost no other site on this coast has.
1,000+
Coral colonies tagged
14
Coral families surveyed
4+
Years of monitoring
Project BEAM
Monitoring without intervention is just a slow, polite record of loss. So in 2024 we launched Project BEAM – Biodiversity Enhancement and Algae Management – as our pilot ecosystem-restoration initiative. Teams manually clear macroalgae from designated reef plots to create substrate for new coral to settle on, and the monitoring protocol follows every plot through the full recruitment, growth and community-shift cycle.
BEAM is small by design. The goal isn’t to restore the whole bay by hand – it’s to prove the method, publish the result, and hand a replicable playbook to every community up and down this coast that’s watching the same ecosystem shift happen.
