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. 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 Fish surveys are conducted using the Reef Visual Census (RVC) stationary point count method (Brandt et al. 2009). Fish surveys are conducted at all NCRMP biological survey sites and may occur concurrently with [...]
Summary
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. 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 Fish surveys are conducted using the Reef Visual Census (RVC) stationary point count method (Brandt et al. 2009). Fish surveys are conducted at all NCRMP biological survey sites and may occur concurrently with Coral Demographic/Benthic Assessment surveys. These data are fish observations from the RVC in the waters of Puerto Rico in 2016, 2019, and 2021. Data were downloaded from the Southeast Fisheries Science Center (https://grunt.sefsc.noaa.gov/rvc_analysis20/) and standardized to Darwin Core for publication in OBIS-USA. Taxa that could not be aligned to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) were filtered out. Data includes water visibility and fish length measurements.
The goal of the fish community surveys is to collect and report information on species composition, density, size, abundance, and derived metrics (e.g., species richness, diversity) using the RVC method in a stratified random sampling design on hardbottom and coral reef habitats, less than 100ft, in U.S. coral reef jurisdictions. More broadly, The Southeast Fisheries Science Center, along with other governmental, academic, and private partners, has been conducting a visual survey of reef fish species in the Florida Keys since 1978. This survey has since been expanded to include the Dry Tortugas and Southeast Florida Region. To learn more about the history, sampling design, and statistical design of the survey, please read Smith et al. 2011.
This dataset includes the data downloaded from https://grunt.sefsc.noaa.gov/rvc_analysis20/?acton=index and standardized to Darwin Core. Taxa that could not be identfied from the included taxonomic data were filtered out.
