WELLWOOD RESTORATION MONITORING

The M/V Wellwood, a 122-meter Cypriot-registered freighter, ran aground on August 4, 1984, on Molasses Reef off Key Largo, Florida. The ship impacted the reef’s upper fore reef and remained aground for 12 days. The grounding destroyed 1,285 square meters of living corals and injured 644 square meters of coral reef framework.  In an effort to restore habitat structure and stability to the grounding site, restoration began in May 2002 (to find out more, visit NOAA's Wellwood page).  REEF was contracted by the National Marine Sanctuary Program to document recruitment of fishes onto the site as well as the subsequent changes, if any, to surrounding reefs sites.

Members of REEF's Advanced Assessment Team before heading out for one of the winter surveys.

REEF’s Advanced Assessment Team and Staff  are conducting the monitoring.  Both Roving Diver surveys and belt transect surveys are being conducted at the Wellwood restoration site and 2 adjacent natural reef sites.  The 5-year project will provide temporal documentation of fish composition changes over time.  The value of the information collected during this project will specifically aid in the assessment of restoration sites as effective replacements for natural habitat.  

One of the restoration modules.  This photo was taken in October 2002.

This is the South Reference site, an area of with spur and groove and some hard bottom areas.

YEAR 1 RESULTS

The team visited the three sites 7 times during Year 1, once in May 2002 prior to the installation of the restoration modules, monthly for 3 months after the restoration was complete (August, September, October 2002), and then quarterly (January, April, and July 2003).  A total of 267 RDT surveys and 246 belt transects were conducted.  

Data summaries of the RDT surveys are linked below (numbers shown are the number of surveys conducted):

A PDF copy of the Year 1 report submitted to NOAA is available for download here.