NOAA coral reef monitoring benthic data from sites across Micronesia from 2009-09-29 to 2015-09-25

Data as a DwC-A file	download 616 records in English (1 MB) - Update frequency: not planned
Metadata as an EML file	download in English (6 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file	download in English (6 KB)

Description

Benthic census data were collected from sites around Micronesia as part of the ongoing Micronesia Challenge. Information on the program can be found at (www.micronesiareefmonitoring.com). Survey sites were selected around each island to be representative of natural environmental gradients, management, and major reef types. Thus, full site designs can be used to evaluate both island trends and site-specific trends. Benthic substrates were evaluated using a photo-quadrat technique. At each site, five 50-m transects were used to measure fishes, corals, and other benthic assemblages between 8–10 m on outer reefs, and at 3–5 m for inner lagoon reefs.Fifty photos were taken at 1-m intervals along each 50-m transect line. Within each photo the benthic substrates were evaluated under five randomly allocated crosses. Benthic-assemblage metrics were derived from data aggregated across the 50 photographs, to the transect level (n = 5). Metrics included coral and macroalgal cover, coral-genus richness, and a benthic substrate ratio defined by the percentage cover of heavily calcifying (corals and CCA) versus non-or-low calcifying (turf, encrusting, and macroalgae) substrates.

Data Records

The data in this sampling event resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 616 records.

2 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

616

75152

6160

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is United States Geological Survey. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: b35db347-0fb6-44fa-9d56-2a831695378d. United States Geological Survey publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by U.S. Geological Survey.