Mobilize citizen-divers to record change in the world’s underwater environments and to engage with scientific, conservation, and government entities to advance the restoration and protection of our natural and cultural treasures.

Divers (scuba divers, free-divers, & snorkelers) from all walks of life who have come together to be the much-needed voice for underwater environments worldwide. We leverage our unique capacity to see how rapidly the underwater world is changing to advance restoration and protection efforts in the local environments we explore and love. Since 2009, Project Baseline has been systematically documenting changes in the underwater world to facilitate scientific studies and establish protection for these critical underwater environments.

Project Baseline started as the conservation initiative for Global Underwater Explorers (GUE), a scuba diving organization formed in 1999 to bring a team-oriented approach to diver training and develop divers capable of contributing to exploration and conservation endeavors worldwide. Project Baseline was started in 2009 when some of GUE’s leaders realized that they’d fallen into the category of elder divers lamenting the degradation and loss of once stunningly beautiful underwater places due to the seemingly inevitable decline associated with progress and development. The idea for Project Baseline was quite simply a refusal to give into that notion of inevitability.

By 2019, it became clear that, in order to clearly demonstrate PB’s commitment to working with all divers and non-divers alike in the pursuit of conservation, the time had come to establish the Project Baseline effort as an independent exclusively conservation-focused 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Project Baseline continues to work closely with GUE. GUE divers across the world continue to constitute the majority of the teams who are regularly engaging in the Project Baseline mission and GUE continues to sponsor Project Baseline both monetarily and through incorporation of the Project Baseline mission into their training programs and messaging.

Too many of us are accepting as inevitable, the piece-by-piece destruction of the underwater environments we cherish along with the amazing animals that live there.

The baselines needed to define pristine, natural, or even acceptable environmental quality in the underwater world simply don’t exist. For the most part, the only baselines are the ones preserved in our memories and those baselines are shifting progressively downward as every generation accepts some decline as inevitable.

Unlike most terrestrial environments, underwater ecosystems lack the public visibility (the voice) needed to act on the alarming rates at which these environments are becoming degraded and destroyed.  We created Project Baseline to be that voice.

Only a small portion of the population has had a first hand encounter with the underwater world. Our goal is to shine a light on what is happening below the surface using images and data collected by the people most connected to those environments. Together, our people and our images and data will help effect the changes needed to Restore & Protect the type of world we all want to live in.

Engage with divers (scuba divers, free-divers, & snorkelers) across the globe through our social media, article writing, and online video documentary campaigns.

Engage with participants and teams to improve their documentation and collaboration efforts.

Engage with researchers, other conservation organizations, and government agencies to identify and pursue collaborations that advance research, restoration, and protection efforts.

Develop and maintain a freely accessible online database that stores and displays the data and images we’re collecting – check out our stats.

Organize collaborative exploration and documentation missions with scientific, conservation, and government entities in areas around the world of critical importance.

Advance the work of our collaborators to understand, restore, and protect underwater environments.