Downscaling Ecological Trends From the Spatially Randomized Datasets of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program

For coral reef managers to cost-effectively maintain and improve reef resilience, they need to understand temporal changes in the reef ecosystem at spatial scales fine enough to capture distinctions in the ecological processes affecting reefs. (Anthony et al. 2015). This monitoring challenge is relatively simple with fixed plot data, but in regionally-focused monitoring programs with spatially randomized sampling it can be very challenging to infer trends over any scale except that for which the survey was explicitly designed (e.g., region, island, sector; Smith et al. 2011). While useful for tracking regional/island scale responses, many ecological drivers and responses that may shed light on patterns of resilience occur at smaller spatial scales than those addressed in regional monitoring designs (McClanahan et al. 2012).

Oliver TA, Barkley H, Couch C, Kindinger T, Williams I. 2020. Downscaling Ecological Trends from the Spatially Randomized Datasets of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum NOAA-TM-NMFS-PIFSC-106, 59 p.  https://doi.org/10.25923/2fef-8r42.