In collaboration with the Hawai'i Coral Bleaching Collaborative, our team in NOAA’s Ecosystem Sciences Division is joining a multi-institution effort to document the extent and severity of coral bleaching in the main Hawaiian Islands. Our goal is to lay t...
U.S. climate impact summaries with new IPCC CMIP6 data
To aid conservation, restoration and efforts to protect coral reefs we produce updated projections of coral reef futures. We will use CMIP6 data to project coral bleaching globally at native model scale (markedly higher than before, 1/4º), produce maps, c...
Developing a carbonate budget assessment methodology for the U.S. Pacific Islands
Carbonate budgets estimate the net rate of calcium carbonate production occurring on a reef as a result of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that add (e.g., calcification by corals and crustose coralline algae) or remove (e.g., corallivory ...
Enhancing Reef Resilience through Process Investigations
While none of these projects is a standard multi-factor 'vulnerability' spatial pattern assessment (sensu MacClanahan et al 2012), each delves deeper into the processes resulting in realized resilience by documenting temporal trends in ecologically releva...
Scaling up coral reef science through Photogrammetry and Artificial Intelligence
The primary goal of this project is to continue assessing how well photogrammetry (also known as Structure-from-Motion or SfM) can be used to improve our understanding of coral reef demographics and vital rates from colony to habitat-scale across the US P...
Assessing impacts of Hawaii's 2019 coral bleaching event on coral recovery and coral communities
As coral bleaching events become more frequent and severe in Hawaii and managers develop resilience-based management plans, it is crucial that we develop a statewide perspective on how reefs are responding to repeated events. The activities we are proposi...
Local resource managers, operating with limited funds, often require reliable access to current, spatially-explicit and easily interpretable data to help prioritize coral reef sites for risk assessments and conservation actions. In the past decade, NOAA a...
Near-real-time in situ sea temperature monitoring to improve Coral Reef Watch predictions and support Mission: Iconic Reefs
The project involves the installment of accurate and reliable in situ temperature buoys at each of the Mission:Iconic Reef sites to allow monitoring of bleaching heat stress in near real time at a spatial scale that is needed to support restoration activi...
Data integrator 2.0: Data management capacity building and enhancing vulnerability assessment functionality
Approach: This project aims to utilize the data collated and relationships built in American Samoa as part of the FY21-23 CRCP Funded Data Integrator Project to help managers improve data management and create a variety of data driven products for manager...
Hawai'i coral bleaching assessment and analysis