Baseline data from Climate Stations in Batangas, Philippines from 2012 to 2015

The NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) traveled to the Verde Island Passage region of the Philippines in 2012 to deploy moored oceanographic (subsurface temperature recorders [STRs]) and ecological (calcification accretion units [CAUs] and autonomous reef monitoring structures [ARMS]) instrumentation, to collect surface and bottom water samples, and to conduct benthic photo-quadrat surveys, which included the collection of benthic images; in 2013 to collect additional water samples; and again in 2015 to recover the instrumentation and to collect another round of water samples and benthic images. All activities were conducted by SCUBA divers at five locations in the municipalities of Mabini and Tingloy, including Batong Buhay, Koala Reserve Area, Arthur's Reef, Twin Rocks, and Batalang Bato. At each of the five locations, a shallow and deep survey site was established for a total of 10 survey sites.

The Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) at NOAA Fisheries is conducting in-situ climate monitoring across the U.S. Pacific Islands Region. Climate monitoring provides a comprehensive view of climate change impacts on coral reef ecosystems and helps identify areas of resilience and vulnerability. The key indicators used to identify and monitor climate-driven trends include 1) thermal stress caused by changes in sea temperature, 2) ocean acidification resulting from changes in carbonate chemistry, and 3) ecological impacts by collecting data on coral growth rates and community structure to understand the impacts of thermal stress and ocean acidification on the ecosystem.

The datasets for the Philippines are part of a 3-year project ("Climate, Biodiversity and Fisheries in the Coral Triangle: Embracing the E in Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management") implemented by CREP. This project was funded by NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Regional Development Mission Asia (RDMA) as part of the U.S. Coral Triangle Initiative, with additional support from the Coral Triangle Support Partnership and USAID Philippines.

The goal of the project was to build on CREP’s expertise to provide tools and information about climate change, ocean acidification, and their impacts on biodiversity and fisheries that could inform and be incorporated into an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM) for the Philippines. CREP worked with local governments, communities, and NGO’s to build science capacity by establishing robust observing capabilities and providing hands-on training to initiate collection of climate science information for the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines that can be used toward adaptive EAFM.