Patterns, trends, and future projections in Pacific coral reef carbonate budgets
Project Motivation: For a reef to persist in the face of disturbance and maintain ecosystem function, the rate at which the reef is growing must outpace the rate at which it is being eroded away. Carbonate budget assessments allow us to determine whether ...
Evaluating an NCRMP Redesign: Zone Based Strategy Power Analysis
To increase the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program's (NCRMP's) power to identify coral reef locations, coral populations, and ecological processes that show differential resilience, we are examining alternative statistical designs for the survey. Spec...
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...
Operationalizing Coral Population Level Assessment to Guide Restoration Monitoring and Success
To have wild coral populations growing comfortably above rates of replacement is a core goal of coral management, conservation, and restoration. In fact this metric - coral population-level growth rate - makes a robust and early indicator of realized resi...
Maximizing information and resilience indicators extracted from monitoring efforts to inform fisheries management
Conserving coral-reef ecosystem function and services remains an critical management goal, including the persistence of desirable features like high coral cover, structural complexity, and fish biomass. Importantly, the persistence of reefs is vital for s...
Incorporating environmental and climate drivers into coral reef community dynamics
The three stand-alone analytical projects that comprise this overall project are detailed below: 1) Linking in situ temperature time series and benthic survey data to assess coral reef bleaching resilience in American Samoa: Results from ESD's FY19 vertic...
Management of key fish taxa to promote the resiliency of coral reefs stems from the assumption that enhancing the abundance of these fishes, such as algal-grazing parrotfishes and surgeonfishes, ultimately increases the ecosystem functions they provide th...
NCRMP Data, Reports, and Information Products for Management
In response to the 2016 CRCP Science Review and the PIFSC External Review of Ecosystem Science, the PIFSC-Ecosystem Sciences Division (ESD) will continue efforts initiated in FY17 to improve the timeliness of analytical products and alignment with nationa...
Patterns, trends, and future projections in Pacific coral reef carbonate budgets