Many NICA volunteers have learned that monitoring the health of sea-grass beds using the traditional quadrat method is hard and messy work, and it has recently proved impossible for NICA to find funds to keep the traditional survey going. But NICA, in partnership with the University of the Sunshine Coast, secured funding from the Norman Wettenhall Foundation in May 2017 to see if modern drone technology might be applied to sea-grass monitoring, to complement or even replace it in some of the more difficult locations. USC hopes to use the project as the basis for an honours or other post-graduate degree.
