From retrieving ghost nets to restoring living coral reefs – a collaborative model for marine restoration

'We are the active eyes, we constantly see the changes, both positive and negative,' Tony Scontrino told FairPlanet with the calm of someone who has decades of diving experience. His diving centre Saracen sits wedged between a fishmonger and a poultry shop on a narrow street in Isola delle Femmine, a small town on Sicily’s northwestern coast, just minutes from the sea. 

In the same interview, Scontrino described witnessing a great deal underwater: gorgonian forests thinning during marine heatwaves, seabeds shifting in colour and composition, invasive species filling the gaps. But one threat remains invisible to most: below the surface of the Mediterranean, kilometres of abandoned fishing nets are still hunting on their own –  trapping, killing, degrading habitats already under pressure.

These so-called ghost nets are not just a Sicilian problem. They are a global crisis. Between 500,000 and one million tonnes of fishing gear are discarded or lost in the ocean every year and according to a 2018 study in Scientific Reports, abandoned nets make up at least 46 per cent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest accumulation zone of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. The WWF estimates that about two thirds of marine mammal species, half of seabirds, and all seven species of sea turtles are at risk from ghost gear. In the Mediterranean – where the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) latest assessment finds 65 per cent of fish stocks are still fished unsustainably – they compound decades of overexploitation and waters warming faster than ecosystems can adapt.

What makes the Sicilian coastline distinctive is a coordinated community response to the problem of ghost nets. Around Scontrino’s diving centre, an alliance has grown between people who normally rarely share the same table: marine scientists, Sea Shepherd Italy volunteers, and recreational divers. 

Volunteer Divers as Scientific Instruments

The most visible expression of the new alliance was Blue Sentinel 2026, a four-day operational workshop held in June 2026, organised by Scontrino’s centre in partnership with Sea Shepherd Italy, the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station (SZN), and the E-Lab at the University of Palermo. 

During this workshop, the alliance discussed ghost-net recovery, biodiversity monitoring across 15 target species including the critically endangered Pinna nobilis, and coral replanting on the seabed.

For Sea Shepherd Italy, the workshop marked a significant shift. Enrico Salierno has coordinated Sea Shepherd’s ghost-net campaign since its launch in 2021. 'Every year we train at the start of the season, because a large part of underwater safety depends on the team knowing each other, having defined roles,' he said in an interview with FairPlanet. In four years, they achieved significant results, as Salierno explained: nearly 13 tonnes of nets removed in over eleven kilometres of seabed with around fifty operations.

His team’s old protocol was simple: bring the net up, sort through it on the surface. Corals, sponges, gorgonians – if they survived the ascent, they went back in. Often they did not. At the Blue Sentinel workshop, the team however learned to optimise the process: identify living organisms before the net moves, detach them underwater, replant them on the seabed immediately. 'For us this is an absolute first,' said Salierno. 'Sea Shepherd measures its actions by the number of lives saved. On a single coral colony live hundreds of other organisms, preventing it from reaching the surface is fundamental.'

Scontrino has shaped this evolution year by year. 'We started with simple recovery. Then underwater scooters for reconnaissance. This year the leap was giving the team a completely different way of reading the underwater environment,' he explained. 'We want to clean the net on the bottom, leave the animals in their environment, and only then recover the material. The survival rate improves significantly,' Scontrino added.

Volunteer divers as scientific instruments

Between dives, researchers from Anton Dohrn Zoological Station are teaching divers how to gather information that scientists can actually use, transforming the volunteers from operators to systematic observers.

Giacomo Milisenda is a marine ecologist at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Palermo, specialised in coralligenous reefs and gorgonian forests. He has collaborated with Scontrino for years; his work with Sea Shepherd began in 2025, when the organisation came to recover a net and he came aboard Sea Eagle, Sea Eagle, Sea Shepherd's vessel, to assess what was living on the net they had recovered.' 

At Blue Sentinel, that collaboration became formal training: video-transect methodology from underwater scooters, standardised filming protocols, software that extracts species identification and abundance, laser-based size measurements. 'A researcher does 30 dives a year. A trained team of divers does that in a week.' Milisenda said. The SZN is also developing an AI model for automated video analysis – still in training – that could eventually process footage from multiple organizations simultaneously.

Scontrino pushes the logic further: multiply those divers across a network of diving centres throughout Sicily, each training their clients to collect standardised observations, and you hand science something no research team could produce alone. Not generic sightings, Milisenda emphasises, but measurable, statistically usable data: 'We want to train divers to do something that genuinely approaches what we do ourselves in research' he said. 

When local fishers tend corals

Milisenda’s connection to this coast also runs through a separate project aiming to involve artisanal fishers directly in coral recovery. This project was launched two years ago by the SZN, is funded by the Sicily Environment Fund, gets support from the University of Barcelona and logistics from Scontrino’s centre.

Fishers bring up gorgonians tangled in their gear very often. Instead of discarding them, a few  now deliver them alive to the diving centre’s aquarium. Here they stabilise for a day or two before being replanted on the seabed by trained divers. 

The gorgonian species this project focuses on is Eunicella singularis, the white gorgonian. It is frequently caught accidentally and is among the most thermally resilient. 'It lives in symbiosis with an alga that provides additional nutrition. It has better chances of survival,' Scontrino said. In a Mediterranean that has already seen widespread die-offs of red gorgonians, replanting with climate resilience in mind is necessary for climate adaptation.

The relationship with the local fishing cooperative was built on trust. Fishers send reports, share observations, and flag problems. 'These people live from the sea. They need to be understood and supported, not just criticised' Scontrino said. Every replanted gorgonian gets an individual ID – any diver can photograph it, note the ID and help to document the growth over time. 'We’ll be able to see how restored organisms respond,' said Milisenda. According to him, these insights will be instrumental in assessing 'whether the restoration is actually working.'

Until sufficient data is collected and analysed, it remains an open question. But here in the small town of Isola delle Femmine, someone is genuinely trying to answer it. 

Scontrino’s dream, he told FairPlanet, is to scale the model across Sicily: building a network of diving centres each training their clients in monitoring to become citizen scientists to multiply data collection to a level no research team could reach alone.