Status of Reef Fishes in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary

Schmitt, Emily

A report based on reef fish survey data using the roving diver technique as part of the REEF/TNC Fish Survey Project. The Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) is a non-profit organization founded in 1990. REEF and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) work jointly on the Reef Fish Survey Project. This is a volunteer-based program of reef fish identification and survey techniques that uses a simple, roving diver method and minimum amount of equipment or training. REEF is primarily responsible for conducting field survey trips, educating volunteers in fish identification, and disseminating reports. TNC is primarily responsible for data quality control, data processing, and report compilation. Since 1993, the first year of the program, over 5,000 volunteers have joined REEF and over 6,000 survey forms have been processed. The objectives of this survey technique are to gain large quantities of species presence and abundance data from reef sites in Florida, the Bahamas, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean in a continuous and efficient manner. During five-day long identification courses, students are shown slides of fishes, many of which are taken from Humann and DeLoach (1989) and taught to identify these fishes by recognizing distinctive body shapes, fin placements, behavior, and coloration. The course consists of approximately 12.5 hours of classroom and lecture time (2.5 hours each day) and 12 dives (with 2 of these being night dives), as well as informal fish identification discussions and post-dive briefings. Each day, students are given classroom instruction in the morning and participate in fish survey dives in the afternoon or evening. At the end of the survey dive, each observer fills out a computerized data scan form indicating which species they saw and the abundance category ( 1, 2-10, 11-99, >100) for each species. There are different skill levels offish identifiers. For this report, the observations of only expert fish surveyors were used. As the REEF Fish Survey Project continues, the number of expert fish surveyors will increase. [...]