Simon Pittman

2015

2016

Local resource managers, operating with limited funds, require reliable spatially-explicit and easily interpretable data to help prioritize coral reef sites for risk assessments and conservation actions. In the past decade, NOAA and other agencies have made substantial investments in data collection for the U.S. Virgin Islands to support effective coral reef conservation. However, the U.S. Virgin Islands currently do not have a comprehensive spatial database or any objective decision support framework to help prioritize sites for conservation. Progress in coral reef conservation is hampered by poor data accessibility and future strategic planning and judicious investments require a comprehensive synthesis of knowledge to identify and objectively rank priority areas, assess threats to those areas and determine associated resiliency. CRCP data products such as seafloor mapping and in-water monitoring programs have shown that coral reefs across the USVI vary geographically in their diversity, structure and resilience. Managers now urgently need to know: Where are the best examples of coral reefs? What are the threats to these ‘Class A’ reefs? Where are the most resilient reefs? This information will allow managers and investors to better prioritize, evaluate and target actions. To address this need, this project produces an objective, data driven decision support framework to prioritize coral reef ecosystems for the entire US Virgin Islands – from shore to shelf edge. It integrates spatial information on resource distributions, biodiversity, resiliency and human uses, including threats to coral reef ecosystem health, using existing survey data and local knowledge. Data is intended to support the DPNR permitting system, enhance risk assessments, support management plans for Areas of Particular Concern and regional ocean governance and begin to map resiliency to identify and rank “reefs of hope”. This synoptic product ensures that management processes and strategic planning decisions are guided by best available information and can also be used to increase awareness of the regions priority areas throughout the broader community. By assigning weightings to evaluate biophysical complexity, biodiversity, connectivity, locations of ecologically and biologically important areas (e.g. ESA species & spawning aggregations) together with resiliency metrics the framework provides a flexible, comprehensive and transparent matrix of site by site weightings across all reef units of the USVI. Quantitative ranking can then be used to classify sites into several categories that will identify: A) the most important and best examples of coral reefs in the USVI; B) coral reefs that have high potential to become Class A reefs with strategic conservation actions; C) coral reefs that have some importance, but have low potential for recovery even with considerable conservation effort. The tool will provide managers with the flexibility to vary weightings depending such that priority sites can be identified using, for example, only information on sites important to the recreational dive industry; or only sites with ESA species present; or by increasing the weighting on biodiversity; or some combination of metrics. The tool will be developed to incorporate new data sets on human uses, ecosystem valuations, and threats as they emerge. Key partners are TNC, UVI & NPS.

A decision support tool to provide DPNR with best-available data when evaluating risk to coral reefs from proposed coastal and marine developments such as roads, buildings, cables & pipelines, boating and other marine uses. This project will provide DPNR with key required data layers for the Caribbean Regional Ocean Partnership. Information that can help in the development of new, and revisions of existing, MPA management plans such as APC and be used for outreach to increase public awareness of the most important reefs in the VI. For CRCP and other funding agencies, the tool provides a synthesis of existing data holdings and a decision support tool for future geographical prioritization of investments and evaluation of physical threats to the viability of coral reefs. For TNC, the data support the reef resilience assessments and the tool can also incorporate TNC data. For UVI, the data will be made available for inclusion in the UVI GeoCAS GIS portal to support research and education. For NPS, the tool can be used to evaluate MPA boundaries and determine how many priority reefs are inside NPS jurisdiction, as well as threat assessments. This tool and the quantitative framework for prioritization are also likely to be portable to other jurisdictions. This project also integrates local ecological knowledge and human use values collected from the professional SCUBA divers of the USVI representing a novel integration of socio-economic and ecological data that will be a great interest to the marine conservation community. When completed the methods are results will form a journal paper.

• U.S. Virgin Islands

• Fish Bay, St. John
• St. Thomas East End Reserve
• St. Croix East End Marine Park

Climate Change

Closed

Completed

https://www.coris.noaa.gov/search/rest/find/document?searchText=projectNumber%3A837%20OR%20projectTitle%3A"Operationalizing%20the%20coral%20reef%20prioritization%20framework%20for%20marine%20managers%20in%20the%20U.S.%20Virgin%20Islands"&start=1&max=10&f=searchPage