Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Abalone Back in the Quadrats
Seven years after seeding began on Tasmania's Lumeriah Coast, juvenile blacklip abalone are turning up in the monitoring quadrats again. Here's why that matters.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Field Notes
Dispatches from Tidewright’s own restoration sites — what the crew saw, measured and learned on the water. (Tidewright’s own stories; fictional.)
85 articles
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes, Humboldt Coast: First Season Learning From Chilean Divers
Tidewright's first Humboldt Coast season: working alongside local diver unions, learning huiro protocols, and finding out what the Chilean coast teaches back.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Refit Day — Taking Drifter 7 Apart to Find Its Faults
A mid-life refit of Tidewright's hardest-worked vessel: what two seasons of reef surveys did to Drifter 7, and what the wear patterns taught the design team.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes10 min read
Field Notes: The Bay of Fires Baseline Survey, Day by Day
Six days on Tasmania's kelp front line: a day-by-day diary of the baseline survey that will decide where Tidewright's next restoration lines go.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes10 min read
Field Notes: First Soundings on the Humboldt Coast
A Tidewright field note from Chile's Coquimbo coast: twelve days of sonar, CTD casts and dive transects to write the first baseline for our newest kelp program.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Reading the Wrack Line with Volunteers
A Tidewright field note: twice a year, volunteers walk Tasmania's beaches counting cast kelp — because the wrack line tells us what the reef can't.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Field Notes8 min read
Drifter Nine Goes Quiet: Finding a Lost Robot at Sea
Drifter Nine stopped phoning home mid-survey off Mendocino. Field notes on the search, the recovery at sea and what the fault log told us afterward.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: The March Canopy Census, Twelve Drone Flights a Day
Every March we fly every southern-hemisphere site at peak canopy. Twelve flights a day, dawn tides, and a data pipeline that turns pixels into a season's verdict.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Mapping the Mendocino Canopy by Drone
A week flying multispectral drone surveys over Mendocino's recovering bull kelp: fog windows, canopy maths, and where the map still needs divers.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Retiring Our First Carbon Credit
Field notes from the day Canopy Ledger's first verified carbon credit was retired — the registry paperwork, the hesitations, and what the crew made of the moment.
Priya Raman ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: The Buoy That Marks a Thousand Hectares
A Tidewright field note from Tasmania's Lumeriah Coast: anchoring a monitoring buoy over the thousandth seeded hectare, and what a big round number is actually worth.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: Open Day at the Hatchery
A Tidewright field note from Triabunna: 300 neighbours, forty schoolkids and one microscope queue at the Holdfast kelp hatchery's first community open day.
Naomi Reyes ·
Field Notes7 min read
Field Notes: What Hokkaido's Kombu Farmers Taught Us About the Harvest
A field note from Hokkaido's kombu coast: stone-beach drying, grading tables and the harvest craft that reshaped how Tidewright handles its own kelp.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: What the Holdfast Census Found in the Urchin Zone
Field notes from a winter holdfast census across a Tasmanian reseeding site: urchin counts on treated vs control transects, and what we changed for next season.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes7 min read
Field Notes: Pulling the First Holdfast Lines, Three Years In
The first Holdfast lines we ever laid are three years old and due for retrieval. What biodegradable seeding lines look like after three winters — and what they taught us.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Sea Trials for Hull Nine
Four days off Fortescue Bay putting Drifter hull 9 through its first sea trials — what we test, what broke, and why the slow tests matter most.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: Spawn Night with the Kudjela Rangers
A Tidewright field note from Gulf St Vincent: collecting golden kelp broodstock by torchlight with the Kudjela Sea Country Rangers, two hours either side of low tide.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Returning to Lofoten in the Dark Season
In eight weeks the light goes at 68° north. What Lofoten's first seeded lines did through their first summer, and the plan for going back in.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: Holding a Nursery Together Through the Winter Storms
Tidewright field note from Lofoten: how a kelp nursery survives December — storm triage, line tensioning, and what three Atlantic gales teach a young crop.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes7 min read
Field Notes: A Ranger Knowledge Exchange in Lofoten
Four Kudjela sea-country rangers fly north to our Lofoten project. A week of sugar kelp, winter light, and two very different coasts trading what they know.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: The School Group That Met a Forest
Twenty-four fourth-graders, forty masks, and one restored kelp bay. Field notes from a Tinderbox school snorkel day — and why it matters to the program.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: Spore Season in Southeast Alaska
Tidewright field note: three September weeks on Sitka Sound collecting kelp sorus — the wild reproduction tissue that seeds every Holdfast line we grow.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
The Harvest Window: Fourteen Days to Pay for a Forest
Fourteen days, one weather window and a quota the reef wrote first — field notes from the harvest fortnight that funds a season on the Humboldt coast.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes7 min read
Field Notes: A New Urchin Crew's First Week on the Reef
Five trainees, two instructors, one Tasmanian barren. What it actually takes to turn working divers into an urchin-removal crew, and what the first week teaches them.
Jack Callum ·