Routine vessel anchoring impacts the seabed with direct and indirect implications the health of the shallow marine environment. Even still, anchoring practices remain largely unmeasured, undocumented, and most importantly, unregulated.
Our pioneering field experiments measured the real-time impacts of anchoring in a multi-vessel campaign. We used two vessels: RV Ikatere, a 14 m catamaran used for data collection before, during and after the anchoring event; and RV Tangaroa, a 73 m blue water research vessel, which was at anchor in Wellington anchorage, Aotearoa/New Zealand. In March 2024, fieldwork started by seafloor surveys before anchoring, as well as in a control site nearby. Then, RV Tangaroa was put on anchor, and equipped with a range of sensors measuring the immediate impacts in the water column.Simultaneously, RV Ikatere was also recording and sampling the anchoring impacts in the adjacent area (e.g., resuspended sediment plume sampling). Finally, the study region was resurveyed again to gain comparative datasets. For the entire duration of the fieldwork campaign, moorings were deployed in strategic locations near the experiment area to measure environmental changes during ship anchoring. This campaign aims to measure, for the first time globally, the range of real-time impacts of commonplace vessel anchoring practices.