Juliette Verstaen

American Samoa Methods Documentation

2023

NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center

"This methods documentation is part of a project out of NOAA's Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center. The goal is to collate and integrate, where possible, coral reef data sets and data streams collected by jurisdictional partners in American Samoa into a singular data set. Integrated data sets aid in robustness of analyses and can be utilized to inform management decisions. Coral reef scientists and monitoring programs employ various survey methods depending on the science question or management goal. Within American Samoa, there are five distinct groups associated with various agencies, each with their unique areas of focus: Coral Reef Advisory Group (CRAG), Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources (DMWR), American Samoa National Park Service (AS NPS), American Samoa Environmental Protection Agency (AS EPA), and American Samoa National Marine Sanctuary (ASNMS). The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC) conducts monitoring e orts in the region every 3-5 years. In addition to these agency-affiliated monitoring programs, data sources in American Samoa may also originate from standalone projects that do not necessarily serve long-term monitoring objectives. Here we document collection methods for the following coral reef data sets: benthic and coral, reef fish community, and environmental."

American Samoa, coral, coral reef, reef fish, water quality, monitoring, survey, methods

NMFS

PIFSC

FY2023 CRCP Project ID 31440; Project Title: Data integrator 2.0: Data management capacity building and enhancing vulnerability assessment functionality; Principal Investigator: Jennifer Samson