The opportunities and challenges in development of a multi-agency program to monitor and assess reef fish populations in the Florida Keys coral reef ecosystem
Brandt M, Zurcher N, Atkinson A. 2009. The opportunities and challenges in development of a multi-agency program to monitor and assess reef fish populations in the Florida Keys coral reef ecosystem. Pages 348–357. In Proceedings of the 62nd Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute Meeting. Cumana, Venezuela. November 2–6, 2009. Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute
Reef fish populations are conspicuous and essential components of coral reef ecosystems, but monitoring strategies have historically varied across agencies in their objectives and designs. An unprecedented multi-agency reef fish monitoring effort involving NOAA Fisheries, the University of Miami, the National Park Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission was initiated across the Florida coral reef ecosystem in 2008. This collaboration builds directly upon a large-scale fisheries-independent survey that began in 1979. The methods are directed to address precipitous declines in fishery resources, understand variability in natural processes, and to evaluate new ecosystem-based management tools like MPAs. There is significant motivation to address the biological, political, economic, and legal issues of these objectives through a shared vision for monitoring and assessment. In this study, precise and cost-effective sampling was achieved by collaborative surveying across the heterogeneous reef landscape using a two-stage habitat-stratified random sampling design. The realized efficiencies and benefits of the multi-agency collaboration significantly outweighed the costs and difficulties encountered along the way.
- Type
- Conference Proceeding Paper
- Authors
- Brandt, Marilyn; Zurcher, Natalia; Atkinson, Andrea
- Units
- BISC , DRTO
- Keywords
- ecosystem-based management, fish habitat relationships, fisheries-independent assessment, multi-agency collaboration, Reef fish monitoring