A new StoryMap highlights the importance of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program’s (NCRMP) Atlantic team and shares their journey through the 2024 and 2025 survey seasons in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.
NOAA’s National Coral Reef Monitoring Program, part of the Coral Reef Conservation Program, works closely with other NOAA offices and local partners to gather data to provide a comprehensive assessment of coral reef ecosystem status and trends across reefs in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific basins. These monitoring efforts take into account multiple components of the reef and human ecosystems, including benthic community makeup, coral health, reef fish populations, environmental conditions, and socioeconomic information collected through community surveys. Monitoring conditions over time help inform management and conservation decisions.
The StoryMap walks users through the process of conducting the surveys, including identifying fish and coral species abundance, measuring their sizes, tracking invasive species, and recording presence of endangered species or signs of coral bleaching or disease.
Divers conducted reef fish surveys at 1,296 sites and reef benthic surveys at 532 sites during the 2024 survey mission across Dry Tortugas, the Florida Keys, and Southeast Florida. Divers also conducted benthic and fish surveys across an additional 38 sites in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. The StoryMap highlights specific “lessons learned” at each location, including indicators of successful fishery management in Dry Tortugas, the secluded nature and lack of human influence in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, and restoration progress from the Florida Keys’ Mission: Iconic Reefs project.
The 2025 survey mission in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico was a wide-scale monitoring effort, involving multiple agency and partner divers completing fish and benthic surveys at a total of 776 sites. After significant coral bleaching in 2023 and 2024, this was the NCRMP biological team’s first opportunity to survey the reefs following this disturbance event. They also used this mission as an opportunity to use a newer approach, collecting imagery data in addition to diver-based data at some sites, generating photomosaics of the reef area for further analysis.
Coral reefs are critically important to coastal communities that rely on them for storm protection, food, and tourism. Data from these monitoring efforts help inform coral reef management, conservation, and restoration practices.
View the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program in the Atlantic StoryMap to follow the full journey and visit the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program Data Visualization Tool to view and download the data.
This work is authorized under the Coral Reef Conservation Act.