NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Coral Benthic Assessment Data

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Conservation Program (Coral Program) invests approximately $5 million of its annual operating budget to support the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) for biological, climate, and socioeconomic monitoring throughout the U.S. Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico coral reef areas. The monitoring program is unique for its national scale across a vast geographic area as well as its progressive inclusion of social science integrated with biophysical science. The effort provides a consistent flow of information about the status and trends of environmental conditions, natural resources, and the people and processes that interact with coral reef ecosystems. The overarching goal is to collect the scientific data needed to evaluate changing conditions of U.S. coral reef ecosystems, which are among the most biologically diverse and economically valuable ecosystems on earth, providing billions of dollars in food, jobs, recreational opportunities, coastal protection, and other important ecosystem services. The program focuses on four monitoring themes: benthic community structure, fish community structure, climate impacts, and socioeconomic condition. Within the benthic theme, the core indicators include: coral species abundance and size structure, coral diversity, coral condition, benthic percent cover, key coral and mobile invertebrate species, and reef rugosity. Data provided here include hard coral species percent cover. The line point intercept method provides a measure of percent cover of biotic and abiotic components of the benthos in a stratified random sampling design in hardbottom and coral reef habitats.

Individual data collections:

Gulf of Mexico: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5vd6wts

Florida: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5xw4h4z

Puerto Rico: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5pg1q23

US Virgin Islands: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5ww7fqk