IMIS

This spatially resolved assessment of the bottom types in the Sanctuary will provide the framework necessary to more efficiently characterize and quantify benthic fish communities throughout the Sanctuary and thus provide an important complement to the inventory work conducted to-date. Purpose: 1) To design a spatially robust sampling strategy to quantify in a spatially robust manner the status of the benthic fish community associated with the diveable portion of the coral cap regions within the Sanctuary; 2) To carry out the initial implementation of this sampling strategy; 3) To design a spatially robust sampling strategy to quantify in a spatially robust manner the status of the benthic fish community associated with the portion of the Sanctuary not reachable by standard SCUBA diving techniques; and 4) To develop a GIS based tool that will assist with the implementation of both strategies including site selection. Additional information: there are 24 fields from the original data represented in the notes column. From left to right, they are batch_code, survey_index, station_code, habitat_structure, permanent_random, management, cover_type, species_group, cover_code, morphotype, species_name, percent_cover, diseased_cover, bleached_cover, height, min_height, max_height, height_variance, individuals, min_individuals, max_individuals, quad_depth, depth_variance and mean_rugosity. These fields are defined in detail by "The Data Dictionary for Coral Reef Ecosystem Assessment and Monitoring Database." This document may be accessed from http://www8.nos.noaa.gov/biogeo_public/query_main.aspx. To identify individual records for these data, the OBIS field CATALOGNUMBER was formulated by concatenating batch_code, survey_index, and a unique, positive integer value.