National Coral Reef Monitoring Program

This is the parent project for metadata held by the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) that is funded by the Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). The underlying metadata records are cataloged under 4 different regions: Hawaiian archipelago, American Samoa, Marianas, and Pacific Remote Island Areas (PRIAs).

This folder is used to organize metadata held by the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) that is part of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). It also serves as a template used to develop metadata records for related data sets.

Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program (Pacific RAMP), established by NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) and supported by NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP), is tasked with documenting and understanding the status and trends of coral reef ecosystems in the U.S. Pacific. Pacific RAMP involves interdisciplinary monitoring of oceanographic conditions and biological surveys of organisms associated with hard-bottomed habitats in the 0 to 30 meter depth range. Regions are surveyed on a triennial cycle, as part of the implementation of NOAA's National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). The NCRMP aims to support integrated, consistent and comparable monitoring of coral reefs across all U.S.-affiliated regions. Partnership and cooperation with other federal and jurisdictional management groups is a core principle of the NCRMP.

Pacific RAMP includes the following biological monitoring objectives:

- Gather information on and document the status and trends of coral reef fishes and benthic assemblages in the U.S. Pacific;

- Provide information on status and trends of coral reef taxa of ecological and economic importance;

- Generate data suitable for tracking and assessing changes in reef assemblages in response to human, oceanographic, or environmental stressors; and

- Generate data suitable for evaluating the effectiveness of specific management strategies, and to support appropriate adaptive management.

The NCRMP provides a steady flow of scientific information required to track the health of coral reefs. This monitoring plan consists of a broad, overarching framework within which scientific research is conducted to achieve coral reef conservation. The four primary goals of NCRMP are: (1) monitor the status and trends of coral reef ecosystems (including human communities); (2) monitor and assess climate-related threats to coral reefs; (3) provide a consistent flow of data and information to communities in coral reef jurisdictions; and (4) foster partnerships to expand the scope and scale of coral reef monitoring.

The NCRMP has three themes: biological, climate and socioeconomic monitoring. Under the biological monitoring theme, the Pacific RAMP collects the both benthic and reef-associated fish data: fish and coral abundance and demographic metrics as well as information on benthic composition and key species.

The National Coral Reef Monitoring Plan (NCRMP) is a framework for conducting sustained observations of biological, climate, and socioeconomic indicators at 10 priority coral reefs across the U.S. and its territories. This integrated approach will consolidate monitoring of coral reefs under a uniform method in the Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico for the first time. NCRMP is funded by the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) and supported by NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS), NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP), and many other partners.

CREP is leading biological monitoring missions to gather data on fish populations and coral reef communities in the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. Each year, CREP's scientists work closely with CRCP and local partners to collect biological data from thousands of strategically selected sites. Innovative analysis techniques are then used to develop products that give fellow scientists, managers, decision makers and the public a better understanding of a region’s resources and how they are changing over time. The biological component of NCRMP provides a triennial ecological characterization at a broad spatial scale of general reef condition for reef fishes, corals and benthic habitat (i.e., fish species composition/density/size, benthic cover, and coral density/size/condition). Data collection occurs at stratified random sites where the sampling domain for each region is partitioned by habitat type and depth. Data provided in this data set were collected in the U.S. Pacific Islands Region as part of CREP-led missions in collaboration with local partners in the various regions.