Coral Favorability: Non-Managed Conditions: Present - American Samoa

Many aspects of the environment are outside the control of local or regional resource managers. These conditions may require concerted global action to affect change (e.g., water temperatures) or cannot be controlled at all (e.g., wave power). This layer synthesized spatial information for several non-managed conditions to create a relative score for how favorable a given location is for coral growth and survival.

Present-day environmental conditions contributing to this layer included: marine calcite concentration (a proxy for ocean acidification), irradiance (photosynthetically available radiation, or PAR), thermal stress (Degree Heating Weeks), and wave power (per meter of wave front).

Covariation in these conditions was accounted for using principal component analysis (PCA) to form composite variables of conditions that have strong relationships with one another. The resulting principal components were averaged and scaled from 0 (worst) to 1 (best) to produce the coral favorability score for non-managed conditions. These data are provided as a raster with a resolution of 500 m for American Samoa, including Tutuila and the Manua Islands (Ofu, Olosega, and Tau).