NOAA participated in a workshop to develop the first international Gulf of Mexico Coral Reef Report Card.
Scientists associated with the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program attended the workshop in Merida, Mexico in November 2019. The Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies and Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Sisal led the workshop, and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Integration and Application Network, which specializes in plain language for environmental report cards, facilitated the workshop. Coral reef scientists from around the Gulf of Mexico participated in the workshop to create a preliminary report card about the status of coral reefs in the region.
The purpose of the report card is to communicate the importance of conserving coral reef habitat in the Gulf of Mexico, and the report card is available in English and Spanish. Currently, different organizations throughout the Gulf of Mexico monitor coral reef ecosystems using different methods which complicates comparisons; therefore, the report card is considered preliminary.
The next step in the project is to standardize data collection across the region to make ecosystem health reporting more comparable.
