Deep-sea corals are important components of the benthos in the Gulf of Mexico, because they provide structural complexity to associated species of fish and invertebrates, and they serve as proxies for environmental conditions on millennial time scales. In the Gulf ...

This report describes the creation and assessment of a moderate-depth benthic habitat map for the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICRNM) south of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. The objective of this effort, conducted by NOAA's Center for Coastal ...

Hawaii's coastal marine resources have declined dramatically over the past 100 years due to multiple anthropogenic stressors including overfishing, coastal development, pollution, overuse, invasive species and climate change. It is now becoming evident that ecosystem-based management, in the form of ...

This study assessed morphological variation of the depth-generalist coral Montastraea cavernosa across shallow and mesophotic coral ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) using thirteen corallite metrics. While corallite structure differed significantly across sites, we observed that mean corallite diameters ...

The Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICRNM) was created to expand the protection of the marine ecosystems around St. John. Monument boundaries were not designed using ecological criteria, but were instead the result of historical land ownership and the ...

The National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) is a strategic plan developed by NOAAs Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) to monitor all U.S. coral reef ecosystems with standardized methodologies (http://www.coris.noaa.gov/monitoring/). The primary monitoring objectives include: Develop consistent survey designs, field ...

The Benthic Assessment (BA) is the first of two benthic surveys conducted in Florida as part of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). Benthic Assessment provides benthic cover estimates for ecologically important cover types/groups (e.g., macroalgae, turf algae, crustose ...

This coral demographics protocol was devised to provide additional, species-specific insight (and ‘signal magnitude’) for corals than is provided by percent cover. Specifics of the protocol are based closely on other long-established monitoring programs in the Atlantic region, including Atlantic ...

The Benthic Assessment (BA) is the first of two benthic surveys conducted in Florida as part of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). Benthic Assessment provides benthic cover estimates for ecologically important cover types/groups (e.g., macroalgae, turf algae, crustose ...

Data provided in this data set were collected around the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) as part of NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS)-led benthic data collection missions for the ongoing National Coral Reef Monitoring Program ...