Sampling May be Haphazardous to your Reef Monitoring Program
Rogers CS. 1998. Sampling May be Haphazardous to your Reef Monitoring Program. St. John, USVI
Because of the difficulty of collecting data underwater and the time and depth constraints imposed by Scuba diving, most monitoring programs designed to document changes in coral reefs over time have been lacking in spatial scale and statistical rigor. Although reef scientists understand the importance of random sampling, few if any monitoring programs have sampling designs based on random selection of study sites. If our goal is to accurately assess the changes on coral reefs on a local, regional or global scale we must have confidence in the data we are depending on. This paper describes a statistically rigorous approach to sampling of coral cover based on the videotaping of randomly selected transects on coral reefs and compares this video method to the more widely-used linear chain transect method.
- Type
- Unpublished Report
- Authors
- Rogers, Caroline
- Date of Issue
- 1998-06-01
- Units
- BUIS
- Keywords
- Assessment, Coral Reef, Data Collection, Monitoring, Random, Research, spatial, Temporal, Video