Caption: Screen grab of infographic for South Florida Trends, 2014-2019. Credit NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program. Click here to view the full infographic.

The Socioeconomic Component of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) gathers and monitors a collection of socioeconomic data in seven U.S. coral jurisdictions. The team started its second monitoring cycle with data collection in South Florida in 2019, and released their report and infographic of summary findings earlier this year. The team has now released a new infographic highlighting trends between the first (2014) and second (2019) monitoring cycles.

The trends shown are based on surveys of residents in Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe Counties. The infographic shows how there have been some changes in residents’ participation in coral reef activities, perceptions of resource conditions, importance of coral reefs, familiarity with threats, and support for management.

These trends offer early glimpses into changes in the status of South Florida’s coral reef adjacent communities in relation to the other U.S. coral reef jurisdictions. As each monitoring cycle takes between five and seven years to complete, South Florida residents are targeted for their third cycle of surveying in 2026 when findings and trends will again be examined.

The NCRMP Socio team is currently busy analyzing data from the second monitoring survey in Hawai’i, and data collection in American Samoa is actively underway.

For more information, contact mary.allen@noaa.gov  or chloe.fleming@noaa.gov.