Monitoring
Monitoring coral restoration efforts is essential to promote effective restoration techniques and to quantify success. In this working group, we ask the following questions. How do we efficiently scale up restoration monitoring? What are the data needed to determine success (or failure) of restoration efforts? The Coral Restoration Consortium steering committee and working group members have defined the following priorities for the group:
- Develop or adapt existing protocols to formulate a best practices or guidelines document for monitoring coral restoration projects. This will be a reference for practitioners, managers, and scientists. Guidelines will be developed in different tiers – from the colony level to the reef, and ecosystem levels.
- Identify program monitoring and metrics to address what makes a restoration program successful.
- Identify remote monitoring techniques (e.g. orbital, manned aerial, and drones) that can be widely adopted, and help CRC members develop the capacity for implementation
- Identify geographic locations where restoration efforts are taking place, and relate to geographic locations of ecosystem monitoring efforts
- Facilitate the development of an open access shared database of restoration monitoring data
Working Group Resources and Products:
-Large Area Imagery Collection & Processing Standard Operating Procedures Version 2.0
-Large Area Imagery Collection & Processing Standard Operating Procedures Version 3.0 Single Rig
-Coral Restoration Foundation Photomosaic Manual March 2019
Restoration Database
The CRC Restoration Database is a geospatial database is designed to track coral restoration efforts throughout the world. Data collected includes who is doing what coral restoration and where. There are three products associated with this tracking effort:
- A Microsoft Access database that records information about coral nurseries and restoration sites
- Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for practitioners to record their coral nursery and restoration data to add to the database.
- An online map to display coral nursery and restoration data.
Please contribute to this effort, by adding your coral nursery or coral restoration data to the database! To contribute, please download the Excel files CRC Nursery Input, CRC Outplant Input, and CRC Monitoring Input fill out the information in the spreadsheets, and return to alison.moulding@noaa.gov. Instructions for filling out the spreadsheets are under the first tab of each file.
If you are interested in viewing the Evaluation Tool or have suggestions for restoration metrics, please contact Stephanie Schopmeyer (stephanie.schopmeyer@myfwc.com).