Mapping New Ground
NOAA Reaches Milestone in Study of Coral Reefs
Scientists
from NOAA, the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, have successfully reached a milestone in safeguarding
endangered coral reefs. In conducting the first-ever comprehensive mapping
of coral reefs in the U.S. Caribbean, scientists from NOAA’s National
Ocean Service applied a newly established scientific classification
method to learn where the reefs are, what lives on them and what their
relationship may be to neighboring habitats and human activities --
something that has never been done before in this region.
The work
in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands will now serve as a model
for future such mapping in Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and other U.S.
territories with coral reefs.
Corals
are ancient animals that date back 400 million years. Over the past
25 million years they have evolved into modern reef-building forms.
One of the most diverse habitats in the world, coral reefs can rival
old growth forests in longevity. Coral reefs are homes and nurseries
for almost a million species of plants, animals and other organisms,
including many that we rely on for food. They protect coastal communities
from storms, wave damage and erosion, support billions in annual economic
activity and promise potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals for cancer
and other serious illnesses.
NEW! Coral Reef Web Site
CoRIS, the new Coral Reef Information System, is now online.
Designed as a single point of access for data and information
derived from NOAA’s programs and projects, the site includes
some 19,000 aerial photos, 400 preview navigational charts,
tide stations, paleoclimatological studies, photo mosaics, coral
reef monitoring, bleaching reports and other information. CoRIS
supports NOAA's activities on the National Coral Reef Task Force
and NOAA's implementation of the National Action Plan to Conserve
Coral Reefs. http://www.coris.noaa.gov/
|
For centuries,
since Christopher Columbus navigated Caribbean waters, maps have shown
little more than the most prominent reefs and other coastal obstructions.
This year, led by NOAA, federal and local partners applied a new, peer-reviewed,
26-category classification scheme to 1,600 square kilometers of water
in Puerto Rico and 500 square kilometers of water in the U.S. Virgin
Islands.
Covering
such features as patch reefs, seagrass and mangroves, the completed
maps represent the first milestone to be reached under a U.S. Coral
Reef Task Force mandate calling for all shallow-water U.S. coral reef
ecosystems to be mapped, monitored and assessed. In conducting the U.S.
Caribbean project, NOAA scientists, led by Matt Kendall and Mark Monaco,
of NOAA Ocean and Coasts' Biogeography Team, worked with staff of NOAA
Fisheries and NOAA's Coastal Services Center, National Geophysical Data
Center and National Geodetic Survey. They partnered with the Caribbean
Fishery Management Council, National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey,
the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Environmental Resources, the Virgin
Islands Department of Planning and Natural resources and others who
contributed a
range of resources to ensure that quality maps were produced for their
islands.
Local potential
users also contributed to all phases of map production. With their high
degree of accuracy and scientific methodology, the resulting suite of
products – digital habitat maps, CD-ROM, printable maps, mosaics
of aerial photography, methods manual and ground truth and control data
– will be vital assets to diverse users.
Understanding
why certain habitats attract particular kinds of fish will help sustain
healthier fisheries.
Recognizing
the link between healthy reefs, their associated habitats and human
activities will contribute to more informed coastal development. Learning
where and under what conditions reefs are healthiest will help sustain
tourism and all the local economies that depend on it.
Hundreds
of excellent aerial photographs are already in action, working to identify
ideal tourist dive spots, mooring buoy sites to keep boats from harming
fragile reefs, and sandy areas that will nurture aquaculture production
of mutton snapper, a popular but disappearing fish that will once again
become available for local use and export.
But without
first locating the reefs, it has not been possible to even begin to
systematically explore relationships among marine habitats. Now with
a complete snapshot of the U.S. Caribbean region and a clear, consistent
baseline for future mapping, scientists will be able to delve into the
kaleidoscope of colors and textures that comprise healthy coral reefs,
identify the sites of those already lost or dying, and begin to compute
a full, more precise picture of the state of U.S. coral reefs.
When Coral is Crushed… Looking Into the Future
By Dr. Mark Fonseca
With an approach
that can readily be applied to other marine habitats under NOAA’s
stewardship, the National Ocean Service’s Center for Coastal
Fisheries and Habitat Research is collaborating with economists
Brian Julius and Kim Barry at NOAA’s Damage Assessment Center
to apply habitat recovery models to coral reef injuries.
Researchers
Mark Fonseca, Jud Kenworthy, Greg Piniak and Paula Whitfield are
in the process of incorporating current biological information
on coral reef recovery from existing literature, and building
computer simulation models to forecast recovery of coral reefs
that have been damaged by human activities, such as when ships
run aground. This kind of modeling is necessary because injuries
are often so severe, that reefs take decades to recover.
Only through
computer simulations can we project our understanding of these
processes into the future and make informed decisions about how
actions taken today may shorten that process. Because responsibility
for these injuries to the reef are often resolved in lawsuits,
the models must meet high scientific standards, requiring them
to be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals to ensure
their admissibility in court. This requires frequent guidance
and consultation from NOAA General Counsel Attorney Sharon Shutler.
Collaboration and publication by a team of biologists, economists
and lawyers are relatively rare.
Funded by
the Coral Reef Recovery Program and other NOAA sources, has produced
two comparable modeling processes that successfully represent
the complex geometry of a grounding injury and its recovery. The
output of these models is used to provide a mathematical formula
that can be used to directly compute ecological functions and
services that would have been provided by the coral reef, had
it not been damaged.
By adding
other attributes to the recovery process as coral reefs spread
across the seafloor, such as the difference in growth rate among
coral species and their rates of natural mortality, a three-dimensional
representation of the recovered system can be built for any given
time in the future. This is a key element in NOAA’s damage
assessment protocol.
Broken and crushed coral from a ship grounding in the Florida
Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
|
Three-dimensional representation of how a coral reef might
look -- 20 years in the future -- after successful restoration
and growth but no coral deaths.
|
|
