Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Water Quality Protection Plan: Coral Reef and Hardbottom Monitoring Project

Wheaton, Jennifer; Jaap, Walter; Dustan, Phillip; Porter, James

A comprehensive introductory rationale for the Coral Reef/Hardbottom Monitoring Project (CRMP) was presented in the First Annual Report (November, 1995). The Florida Key National Marine Sanctuary and Protection Act (HR5909) designated over 2,800 square nautical miles of coastal waters as the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS). The Act required the US Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Florida to implement a Water Quality Protection Program in cooperation with NOAA. Programs in monitoring seagrass habitats, coral reefs and hardbottom communities, and water quality were instituted with the intent of integrating information with water quality as the central focus. The primary goal of the monitoring project is to measure the status and trends of these communities to assist managers in understanding, protecting, and restoring the living marine resources of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Data from the project will be used to determine an (1) overall net reef decline in percent cover, stony coral species richness, and other measurable community parameters, (2) overall net increase in measurable reef community parameters, (3) significant changes observed in individual reefs with no overall change on a landscape scale (decreases in one location balanced by increases elsewhere) or changes that are linked to specific regions of the landscape. Each of these potential mechanisms of change will result in different spatial patterns of change. A Sanctuary-wide, rather than a single-location survey, is necessary to detect ecosystem change. This Sanctuary-wide project will document the status of reef habitats at 40 reef sites located within 5 of the 9 EPA Water Quality Segments in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (Figure 1). The randomly located reefs in this project may show no decline. Alternatively, all the reefs may show decline. Pollution from Florida Keys sources or damage from divers should give relatively precise signals. As the coral reef monitoring is integrated with the seagrass and water quality programs, the results can be used to focus research on determining causality and can be used to inform and evaluate management decisions. The Coral Reef/Hardbottom Monitoring Project provides the first real opportunity in the Florida Keys to address these questions at the spatial scales required to detect large scale patterns and discriminate between hypotheses.