Coral Resilience By NOAA NCRMP Sector - American Samoa

Records of coral cover from the recent past can inform management strategies for reef restoration and protection. When combined with data on where current or future environmental conditions are most favorable, we can learn where corals are thriving because of or in spite of a healthy marine environment. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regularly surveys the health of coral reefs in the Pacific Islands as part of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). Divers record coral cover at a series of sites across different reef zones and depths. These surveys are then aggregated across spatial sectors, which divide the waters around the island into ecological units useful for management and monitoring.

Resilience can be defined as the ability of a system to resist change during a disturbance or as the ability to recover quickly after a disturbance-induced change. This project analyzed trends in coral cover from the NCRMP from 2009 to 2018 to identify sectors that demonstrated either of these criteria for resilience. Coral sectors that maintained stable coral cover at relatively high levels were considered highly resilient. Sectors that demonstrated relatively rapid increases in coral cover over time were considered moderately resilient, and sectors that lost coral cover were considered to have low resilience. This project examined how the spatial distribution of highly resilient sectors related to areas with high environmental favorability.

This layer represents geospatial polygons of the NCRMP coral sectors divided into three categories: high, moderate, and low coral resilience.