Coral Reef Watch
What is requested?
NOAA requests a $0.5 million increase for NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) to conduct research to improve understanding of coral reef ecosystems through monitoring and predicting changes. The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami, FL, will manage this research effort in cooperation with National Undersea Research Program (NURP) research at the Caribbean Marine Research Center.
Why do we need it?
This initiative works toward NOAA's Stewardship goal to "Sustain Healthy Coasts" by improving understanding of coral reef ecosystems through environmental monitoring, predicting future change, and providing near real-time information synthesis products. Long-term in situ coral reef monitoring stations will provide information essential for sound management decisions, long-term planning, and important research.
NOAA is committed to providing fundamental environmental data in fulfillment of its overall mission, its mandates from the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force Action Plan, and its formal collaborative agreement with the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. These data are produced in response to global recognition of the need for effective management of coral reef ecosystems and the economically important commercial fisheries and tourism they help to sustain.
The initiative builds on existing NOAA coral reef activities and seeks to develop an end-to-end approach that exploits NOAA strengths in observations and monitoring. Unique information products reinforce NOAA's established leadership in producing, analyzing, and processing environmental information, and its ability to provide data and information products to a diverse audience. The initiative extends existing collaboration between the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and National Ocean Service (NOS) to map and monitor U.S. coral reefs.
What will we do?
AOML will use NURP field observations
at the Caribbean Marine Research Center (CMRC) at Lee Stocking
Island, Bahamas, to better understand coral reef ecosystem response
to the physical environment.
AOML will predict coral bleaching episodes through the NESDIS/OAR
Coral Reef Early Warning System (CREWS) software and the field
monitoring station, and will further develop CREWS. AOML will:
- establish an additional monitoring station in the U.S. Virgin Islands,
- provide continuing support for CREWS stations already established (i.e., Lee Stocking Island, NW Hawaiian Islands), and
- provide near real-time inference of data to predict coral bleaching and other coral phenomena.
NURP's science staff will support the
CREWS effort by maintaining the stations at Lee Stocking Island
and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
These data and information products will also be used to verify
current NESDIS satellite-based monitoring techniques to support
coastal health and coral monitoring. AOML will also continue
to maintain the Coral Health and Monitoring Program (CHAMP) web
page, provide the international coral-list listserver, and support
NOAA's Coral Reef Data and Information Management System.
What are the benefits?
CREWS stations provide decision support
for sanctuary managers and timely feedback to researchers studying
bleaching and other biological events in the coral reef ecosystem.
CREWS offers critical ground-truthing of NESDIS HotSpot techniques
used to predict coral bleaching. It is the first marine environmental
monitoring tool of its kind and successfully predicted coral
bleaching in the Florida Keys and the Great Barrier Reef.
The CHAMP web page receives up to 15,000 hits per day by researchers and the public; it has become an essential information resource. It is the primary communications link among over 1,600 coral reef researchers worldwide and is used to announce major symposia, coral bleaching alerts, and major policy announcements by Federal agencies and non-governmental organizations.