Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands

This dataset results from an analysis of exposure, resilience, and social vulnerability to climate change threats for the coral reefs of the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. Standard methodologies were applied to assess ecological resilience and social vulnerability of communities surveyed by the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) in the Pacific. The analysis focuses primarily on increases in ocean temperatures and the impact of coral bleaching on the U.S.'s Pacific coral reefs and the communities that depend on them. Findings from the analysis are presented in a publication series, Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change, for the main Hawaiian Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The coral reef resilience indices include 7 ecological factors and temperature variability. The ecological data were derived from NCRMP datasets from 2013 to 2015---including coral demographic surveys (coral diversity, coral disease, juvenile coral density, bleaching resistant corals), reef fish surveys (herbivorous fish biomass, fishing depletion), and photoquadrat surveys (macroalgal cover)---with factor selection and calculation following McClanahan et al. (2012) and Maynard et al. (2015). Temperature variability data are from Heron et al. (2016). The 8 factors were normalized and combined to derive total resilience, bleaching resistance, coral competitiveness and other stressors. All social vulnerability data were derived from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), analyzed following Kleiber et al. (2018). Social vulnerability indices include housing characteristics, labor force, personal disruption, population composition, and poverty. Exposure data presented in the publication series are directly from van Hooidonk et al. (2016) and are not included with this dataset.

The geographic data file to plot the ecological data generated from the analysis are included with this dataset. The social data can be plotted using the TIGER Line shapefiles for county subdivisions from the U.S. Census Bureau.

To use existing data to inform resilience-based management of the coral reef areas of U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands.

Four publications resulted from this analysis:

1. Thomas A. Oliver, Danika Kleiber, Justin Hospital, Jeffrey Maynard, Dieter Tracey. Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change: Main Hawaiian Islands. Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, PIFSC Special Publication, SP-20-002a. 6 p. https://doi.org/10.25923/5xhp-5k12

2. Thomas A. Oliver, Danika Kleiber, Justin Hospital, Jeffrey Maynard, Dieter Tracey. Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change: Guam. Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, PIFSC Special Publication, SP-20-002b. 6 p. https://doi.org/10.25923/mpdz-jm19#

3. Thomas A. Oliver, Danika Kleiber, Justin Hospital, Jeffrey Maynard, Dieter Tracey. Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change: Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, PIFSC Special Publication, SP-20-002c. 6 p. https://doi.org/10.25923/sn8p-4z44

4. Thomas A. Oliver, Danika Kleiber, Justin Hospital, Jeffrey Maynard, Dieter Tracey. Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change: American Samoa. Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, PIFSC Special Publication, SP-20-002d. 6 p. https://doi.org/10.25923/t9tm-pa91

This project aimed to make use of NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) and U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data to inform jurisdictional managers about the resilience potential/vulnerabilty of their social-ecological systems.

This dataset is a collection of ecological and social metrics derived from NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) in-situ surveys and the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), respectively. Ecological including: Coral Diversity, Herbivorous Fish Biomass, Macroalgae Cover, Juvenile Coral Density, Fishing Depletion, Coral Disease, Bleaching Resistant Corals, and Temperature Variability.

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.

U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands in the NOAA Fisheries Pacific Islands Region

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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 acknowledgment:

"This publication makes use of data products gathered by the Ecosystem Sciences Division (ESD), 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. 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 Fisheries, Ecosystem Sciences Division (ESD) when using the data.

Suggested citation:

Ecosystem Sciences Division, Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, 2020: Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/inport/item/59258.

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Data were compiled and analyzed using R version 3.6.1

For accuracy of each of the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) ecological metrics or the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) social metrics, please refer to the original survey effort. With regard to the aggregated factors, or indices, bear in mind that the indices are either the unweighted combination of normalized factors (ecological) or the principal component analysis (PCA) weighted combination of normalized factors (social).

Ecological: while the original method cited 11 factors to be most desirable in assessing resilience, data on only 8 factors were widely available across the survey domain.

Social: As the domain consists of broadly under-surveyed jurisdictions, availability of data played a large role in the selection of metrics to include in our various indices.

Uninhabited CCDs and/or islands including lightly habited places like Palmyra were also excluded either due to lack of data or lack of population to survey. Swains was included in this study, however those data were excluded from the resilience and vulnerability publications due to small sample size and peculiar results.

This analysis was designed to as closely represent the conceptual vision given available data.

Both the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) and the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) run thorough quality control procedures described in their respective surveys. Our analysis was reviewed by all co-authors, their respective Division chiefs, and NOAA Fisheries technical and editorial review by the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.

NOAA IRC and NOAA Fisheries ITS resources and assets.

In this analysis, we report distinct factors associated with climate exposure, ecological resilience, and social vulnerability, and then aggregate normalized factors in each category to report an overall exposure, resilience, or social vulnerability metric.