Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program: Assessing and Monitoring Cryptic Reef Diversity of Colonizing Marine Invertebrates using Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (A...

To support a long-term program for sustainable management and conservation of coral reef ecosystems, from 2008, Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) have been deployed and/or recovered across the U.S. on Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program (Pacific RAMP) cruises conducted at two to three year intervals by the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) at the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC).

CREP partnered with other scientists from the Census of Marine Life (CoML) Census of Coral Reef Ecosystems (CReefs) to develop Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS). ARMS mimic the complexity of coral reefs to attract/collect colonizing invertebrates and provide a systematic, consistent, and comparable method to monitor cryptic reef diversity.

The key innovation of this method is that ARMS sample biodiversity over precisely the same surface area in the exact same manner. Thus, the use of ARMS is a systematic, consistent, and comparable method for monitoring the cryptobiota community overtime.

The data was gathered from the Hawaiian Archipelago, the Mariana Archipelago, American Samoa, and the Pacific Remote Island Areas between 2010 and 2012. At specific reef sites, divers enter the water and deploy and/or recover the ARMS unit. Each unit consists of 23 cm x 23 cm gray, type 1 PVC plates stacked in alternating series of 4 open and 4 obstructed layers and attached to a base plate of 35 cm x 45 cm which is affixed to the reef. They are designed to mimic the structural complexity of a reef and attract colonizing invertebrates.

Upon recovery, the ARMS unit is encapsulated, brought to the surface, and disassembled and processed onboard the research ship. Disassembled plates are photographed to document recruited sessile organisms and scraped clean and preserved in 95% ethanol for future DNA processing. Recruited motile organisms are sieved into 3 size fractions: 2 mm, 500 um, and 100 um. The 500 um and 100 um fraction is bulked and preserved in 95% ethanol for future DNA processing. The 2 mm fraction is sorted into morphospecies. These DNA sequencing data are not included in this dataset.

The Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program (Pacific RAMP), established by the NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) and supported by NOAA's 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 - 30 m depth range. Regions are surveyed on a biennial cycle and aims to support integrated, consistent and comparable monitoring of coral reefs across all U.S.-affiliated regions.

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With an increasing scarcity of trained invertebrate taxonomists, ARMS enable researchers to obtain information using molecular techniques, particularly for small, cryptic organisms that constitute the bulk of reef diversity. ARMS provides a standard method for taxonomic and molecular analysis to assess invertebrate biodiversity and improve ability to measure/monitor diversity of cryptic organisms globally over time.

NOAA IRC

Specimen retrieval data includes metadata for each ARMS unit (where, deployment / retrieval date) and individual specimens identified to the lowest taxonomic level possible along with a count.

While every effort has been made to ensure that these data are accurate and reliable within the limits of the current state of the art, NOAA cannot assume liability for any damages caused by errors or omissions in the data, nor as a result of the failure of the data to function on a particular system. NOAA makes no warranty, expressed or implied, nor does the fact of distribution constitute such a warranty.

Marianas Archipelago

American Samoa

Hawaiian Archipelago

Pacific Remote Island Areas

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NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) Data Sharing Recommendations, version 9.0 updated August 12, 2015:

CREP welcomes the opportunity to collaborate on research issues contributing to the scientific basis for better management of marine ecosystems. CREP has a very diverse set of field activities that generates large volumes of data using an array of data collection protocols.

The following recommendations are for your consideration as you use this data:

1) Data analyses should take all field exigencies into account. The most effective way to do this would be active collaboration with CREP principal investigators.

2) In all presentations, product releases, or publications using data generated by CREP, proper acknowledgement of both CREP and the individuals responsible for data collection is expected. Citing the DOI (if available) is preferred, a non-DOI example is listed below.

3) If you collect or generate data for the same study areas, CREP requests that you share relevant information on complimentary data collections.

4) Those receiving data are strongly urged to inform the CREP Data Management Team of any errors and discrepancies that are discovered during the course of using these data. They are further urged to bring to the attention of the Team all problems and difficulties encountered in using these data. This information is necessary in order to improve the collections and to facilitate more efficient and economical data processing and retrieval. The users are asked to supply copies of any missing data that may be located, and to provide information as to significant subsets and special aggregations of data that are developed in using the material provided.

Example citation:

"This publication makes use of data products provided by the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP), Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with funding support from the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) and the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC). The analysis and interpretations presented here are solely that of the current authors.”

Data can be accessed online via the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Ocean Archive.

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Please cite NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) when using the data.

Suggested citation:

Coral Reef Ecosystem Program; Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (2016). Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program: Assessing and Monitoring Cryptic Reef Diversity of Colonizing Marine Invertebrates using Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) Deployed at Coral Reef Sites across the U.S. Pacific from 2008 to 2012. NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/inport/item/36038.

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Microsoft Access

All species identifications are made visually by a trained analyst and subsequently reviewed by a taxonomic expert or through molecular processing for accuracy.

All ARMS units that are recovered are disassembled, photographed, and sorted by size. Taxonomic classification occurs for materials greater than 2 mm. The research and development of the genetic analysis of ARMS samples is being done in collaboration with partners and data may exist for a subset of locations. ARMS that have been deployed may not have been recovered due to logistical constraints of the following mission or could not be found when divers returned to the site.

ARMS sample biodiversity over precisely the same surface area in the exact same manner. Thus, the use of ARMS is a systematic, consistent, and comparable method for monitoring the cryptobiota community overtime. Three units are deployed at each site to allow for replicate measurements. Divers typically record ARMS metadata into the master Microsoft Access database within a few days of the field operations and/or ARMS processing. QA/QC procedures by the ARMS team and the Cruise Data Manager are typically completed during the field mission.

The data entered in the MS Access database is quality controlled following data entry.

The MS Access database is stored on the PIFSC network and regularly backed up by ITS.

Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) are assembled, deployed on the benthos for 1-3 years during which they are colonized with marine organisms, recovered and processed as described below. The > 2-mm organisms are identified and counted, and the data is recorded in an MS Access database. The smaller fractions are sent for genomic analysis, although those data are not included with this dataset. This data can be found through its respective metadata record in the “Related Items” section below.