NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Coral Demographic Data

Occurrence Observation
Latest version published by United States Geological Survey on Feb 24, 2025 United States Geological Survey
Home:
https://www.coris.noaa.gov/monitoring/
Publication date:
24 February 2025
License:
CC-BY 4.0

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file download 191,348 records in English (2 MB) - Update frequency: as needed
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Metadata as an RTF file download in English (14 KB)

Description

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Conservation Program (Coral Program) invests approximately $5 million of its annual operating budget to support the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) for biological, climate, and socioeconomic monitoring throughout the U.S. Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico coral reef areas. The monitoring program is unique for its national scale across a vast geographic area as well as its progressive inclusion of social science integrated with biophysical science. The effort provides a consistent flow of information about the status and trends of environmental conditions, natural resources, and the people and processes that interact with coral reef ecosystems. The overarching goal is to collect the scientific data needed to evaluate changing conditions of U.S. coral reef ecosystems, which are among the most biologically diverse and economically valuable ecosystems on earth, providing billions of dollars in food, jobs, recreational opportunities, coastal protection, and other important ecosystem services. The program focuses on four monitoring themes: benthic community structure, fish community structure, climate impacts, and socioeconomic condition. Within the benthic theme, the core indicators include: coral species abundance and size structure, coral diversity, coral condition, benthic percent cover, key coral and mobile invertebrate species, and reef rugosity. Data provided here include species abundance. The coral demographics protocol provides more detailed and species-specific insight (‘signal magnitude’) for coral populations. Individual data collections: Gulf of Mexico: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5vd6wts Florida: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5xw4h4z Puerto Rico: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5pg1q23 US Virgin Islands: https://doi.org/10.7289/v5ww7fqk

Data Records

The data in this occurrence 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 191,348 records.

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.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS), NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC), Groves S, Williams B, Sturm A (2025). NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Coral Demographic Data. Version 1.13. United States Geological Survey. Occurrence dataset. https://ipt-obis.gbif.us/resource?r=noaa_ncrmp_demographic_data&v=1.13

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is United States Geological Survey. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: fd4dfaf4-8d96-4ba3-9e53-9a6c33f71c10.  United States Geological Survey publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation

Contacts

NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS)
US
NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC)
US
Sarah Groves
  • Metadata Provider ●
  • Processor
NOAA NCCOS / CSS
Bethany Williams
  • Metadata Provider ●
  • Processor
NOAA NCCOS / CSS
Alexis Sturm
  • Metadata Provider ●
  • Processor
NOAA NCCOS
Erica Towle
  • Distributor ●
  • Point Of Contact
  • National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Coordinator
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coral Reef Conservation Program
Abby Benson
  • Publisher
  • Biologist
U.S. Geological Survey
Stephen Formel
  • Processor
  • Biologist
U.S. Geological Survey

Geographic Coverage

Portions of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean.

Bounding Coordinates South West [17.636, -93.823], North East [27.919, -64.431]

Taxonomic Coverage

Reef corals

Phylum Cnidaria

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date 2013-07-08 / 2024-08-01

Project Data

Coral reefs are among the most valuable ecosystems on earth, providing people with goods and services that include food, storm protection, and recreational opportunities. Despite their importance, coral reef ecosystems are in decline from a myriad of man-made and natural threats. In response, the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program established an integrated and focused monitoring effort with partners across the U.S.—the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). This program is a strategic framework for conducting sustained observations of biological, climatic, and socioeconomic indicators in U.S. states and territories. The resulting data provide a robust picture of the condition of U.S. coral reef ecosystems and the communities connected to them.

Title NOAA'S NATIONAL CORAL REEF MONITORING PROGRAM
Funding NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program
Study Area Description Coral reef ecosystems in U.S. states and territories.
Design Description The goals of NCRMP monitoring are to: (1) develop consistent and comparable methods and standard operating procedures (SOPs), which detail specific field, laboratory, and/or analytical procedures and best practices, for all indicators (with periodic updates to reflect new technologies or logistical considerations); (2) develop and maintain strong partnerships with federal, state/territory, and academic partners; (3) collect scientifically sound, geographically comprehensive biological, climate, and socioeconomic data in U.S. coral reef areas; (4) deliver high‐quality data, data products, and tools to the coral reef conservation community provide context for interpreting results of localized monitoring; (5) provide periodic assessments of the status and trends of the nation’s coral reef ecosystems.

The personnel involved in the project:

Erica Towle
  • Point Of Contact

Sampling Methods

NCRMP Coral Demographic surveys are designed to collect and report data on scleractinian coral species composition, density, size, abundance, and specific parameters of condition (% live and dead, bleaching, disease) of non-juvenile scleractinian corals (≥4 cm maximum diameter), and overall species diversity (all scleractinian corals). The survey also includes data collection per colony within the survey area for percent of colony with recent mortality (i.e., dead white skeleton), percent of old mortality, bleaching (i.e., total bleaching of the entire colony, partial bleaching of the colony, or paling), coral disease (present or absent), and whether the colony is identifiable as a restored/outplanted coral (i.e., No, Yes, Unknown). Exact identification or precise designations of specific coral diseases (e.g., named disease types) are not recorded because (1) low temporal resolution of the NCRMP’s biennial sampling may not coincide with episodic disease outbreaks, and (2) visual symptoms of various coral diseases are often indistinguishable in the field and can require collection of tissue samples for accurate disease identification. At each NCRMP Benthic survey site, a single Coral Demographics Survey is conducted within a 10 x 1m belt transect area. A NCRMP Benthic survey includes one Coral Demographics survey and one Benthic Community Assessment survey (CRCP 2022a). NCRMP Benthic surveys may occur at all or a subset of NCRMP Fish surveys. Benthic surveys may be conducted concurrently with co-located NCRMP Fish surveys (CRCP 2022b), or Benthic and Fish surveys may occur at separate field visits.

Study Extent The National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP)’s biological sampling provides a biennial ecological characterization of general reef condition for reef fishes, corals, and benthic habitat (i.e., fish species composition, density, and size; coral species composition, density, size, condition; and benthic community cover) at a broad spatial scale (NCRMP 2021). In the U.S. Atlantic, NCRMP biological sampling includes coral reef and hardbottom habitats in Florida, Flower Garden Banks, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). NCRMP conducts surveys at stratified random sites where the sampling domain for each geographic region is partitioned by habitat type and depth, sub-regional location (e.g., along-shelf position), and management zone.
Quality Control For details see the NCRMP Coral Demographics Survey Field Protocols: https://doi.org/10.25923/9a1r-m911

Method step description:

  1. For details see the NCRMP Coral Demographics Survey Field Protocols: https://doi.org/10.25923/9a1r-m911

Bibliographic Citations

  1. CRCP. 2022. National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) Coral Demographics Survey Field Protocols for U.S. Atlantic: Florida, Flower Garden Banks, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands. 2022. NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program. 27 pp. doi: 10.25923/9a1r-m911