State of the Reef Report

(The voice of CoCo this week is provided by Qamar Schuyler, Coral Outreach Specialist for Coral Reef Management Office, Division of Environmental Quality, and Division of Fish and Wildlife.)

Attention all coral reef lovers! The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is about to release a new publication about the status of coral reef ecosystems in 14 jurisdictions.

According to NOAA, The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of the United States and Pacific Freely Associated States: 2005 represents an initial effort to determine the condition of shallow water coral reef ecosystems based on the results of assessment and monitoring activities conducted by Federal, State, Territory, Commonwealth, non-governmental, private, and academic partners. The report was produced in close collaboration with teams of experts that wrote chapters on the condition of coral reef ecosystems in 14 jurisdictions, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Florida, Hawaii, American Samoa, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the CNMI, Guam, Palau, and other remote Pacific islands such as Jarvis, Palmyra, and Kingman. Data and information presented in the report represent the contributions of over 160 scientists and managers working throughout the country as part of a growing coral reef integrated observing system.

NOAA’s Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment’s Biogeography Team, part of the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, led the development of the report with support from NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program. The report is the second in a series, the first of which provided a more general assessment of the health of coral reefs, without incorporating as much quantitative data.

The book is organized by area, and includes a chapter for each of the 14 jurisdictions that contain coral reef ecosystems. Each of the chapters provides information about the geographic extent of reef ecosystems, existing monitoring activities, and information on water quality, benthic habitats, and associated biological communities, as well as discussions of key threats to ecosystem health, current conservation management activities, and recommendations for future research and management. The national summary chapter presents broad-scale conclusions about the state of coral reef ecosystems. Data collection and reporting of information, such as that done by the CNMI’s own interagency Marine Monitoring Team, is crucial to management efforts to protect and conserve coral reef ecosystems. It is hoped that this and future reporting efforts will help identify and fill gaps in the current state of knowledge about U.S. coral reef ecosystems. The goal of this effort is to provide up-to-date, accurate, comprehensive scientific information to enable managers and others to slow or reverse the general decline in coral reef ecosystem health that has become evident in the last several decades.

So…that’s the big news, but what are some of the findings for the CNMI? The publication will be available in September, (see http://ccma.nos.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coralreef/coral_report_2005.html) but today we’ll offer you a preview of key findings. Here in the CNMI, we completed our first collaborative assessment of the entire archipelago in 2003. This effort, part of NOAA’s Mariana Archipelago Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program, or MARAMP cruise, greatly increased scientists’ understanding of various parts of the ecosystem, including fish stocks, coral cover, and oceanographic patterns. The researchers discovered that densities of large fish were higher in the remote northern islands, suggesting that there is more intense fishing pressure in the southern, more densely populated islands. The MARAMP cruise will be back in CNMI waters this year, returning to the same sites to gather updated information. This year, there will also be an educational component to the cruise, including a website with daily updates from scientists on the cruise, so that teachers and students can follow along with the voyage in their classrooms and homes. Keep your eyes here in future weeks for more details about the State of Coral Reef Ecosystems report, as well as about the upcoming MARAMP cruise.

CoCo