Guam Long-term Coral Reef Monitoring Program Reef Fish Surveys since 2010
Description
The Government of Guam's Long-term Coral Reef Monitoring Program, coordinated by the Guam Coastal Management Program until October 2013 and now coordinated by the University of Guam Marine Lab, involves the collection of data for a suite of coral reef ecosystem health parameters at several high priority reef sites around the island of Guam, including Tumon Bay, East Agana Bay, Piti Bay, and Western Shoals. Sites at Fouha Bay, the Achang Reef Flat Marine Preserve, and the Eastern seaward slope near Cocos Island will be established in 2014. Data are collected annually or biennially by a team of highly-trained field biologists from the Guam Coastal Management Program, the NOAA Pacific Islands Regional Office, the University of Guam Marine Lab, and with occasional assistance by staff from other agencies. Fish are a culturally and economically valuable resource for the island of Guam (van Buekering et al., 2007). In recognition of the high value of this resource, reef fish surveys are a key component of the Guam Long-term Coral Reef Monitoring Program. Reef fish assessment surveys have been conducted at high priority reef sites around Guam since August 2010. The surveys are carried out at numerous sampling stations within each monitoring site, the locations of which were generated randomly using a Geographic Information System and the relevant bathymetric and benthic habitat data. A split-panel approach is currently used for the sampling design, with half of all sampling stations in a given site being fixed and half re-randomized every visit or every other visit. The monitoring team uses a Stationary Point Count Method, adapted from Ault et al. (2006) and NOAA Fisheries, Coral Reef Ecosystem Division (Williams et al., 2011), to conduct the reef fish surveys. These monitoring data on reef fish communities provide results on fish density, biomass, and diversity; allow for exploration of community structure by functional group and size structure; and can be used to detect changes in fish communities over time.
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Tags
- coral reef ecosystem
- reef fishes
- spc
- united states of america
- western pacific ocean
- reef monitoring and assessment
- marine ecosystem
- corals
- biosphere
- east agana bay (13n144e0063)
- oceans
- long-term monitoring program
- guam coral reef monitoring data management initiative
- guam
- numeric data sets
- marianas
- piti bay (13n144e0061)
- fish species richness
- biology
- guam (13n144e0000)
- rapid ecological assessments
- fish
- earth science
- guam long-term coral reef monitoring program
- rea
- mariana archipelago
- reef fish census
- marine biology
- fish assemblages
- stationary point count survey
- mariana islands
- western shoal (13n144e0062)
- coral reef ecology
- ocean basin
- stationary
- coastal processes
- species richness
- zoology
- coral reefs
- 488
- fish census
- coris_metadata
- pacific ocean
- rapid assessment studies
- ecological dynamics
- country/territory
- tumon bay (13n144e0004)
- fish biomass