Puerto Rico Reef Visual Census (RVC) 2016 - 2021

The National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP)’s biological sampling provides a biennial ecological characterization of general reef condition for reef fishes, corals, and benthic habitat (i.e., fish species composition, density, and size; coral species composition, density, size, condition; and benthic community cover) at a broad spatial scale. In the U.S. Atlantic, NCRMP biological sampling includes coral reef and hardbottom habitats in Florida, Flower Garden Banks, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). NCRMP Fish surveys are conducted using the Reef Visual Census (RVC) stationary point count method (Brandt et al. 2009). Fish surveys are conducted at all NCRMP biological survey sites and may occur concurrently with Coral Demographic/Benthic Assessment surveys. These data are fish observations from the RVC in the waters of Puerto Rico in 2016, 2019, and 2021.
Data were downloaded from the Southeast Fisheries Science Center (https://grunt.sefsc.noaa.gov/rvc_analysis20/) and standardized to Darwin Core for publication through OBIS-USA. Taxa that could not be aligned to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) were filtered out. Data includes water visibility and fish length measurements.