Marine ecosystems are increasingly threatened by overfishing, pollution, coastal development and climate change, underscoring the need for long-term, representative information on key fish populations and habitats to inform management and policy. Underwater fish observation techniques, such as Underwater Visual Census (UVC - which includes the REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project), stereo-Baited Remote Underwater Video (stereo-BRUV), and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), all play a key role in sustaining long-term data collection.
This paper was one output of a multi-year Working Group called "Advancing Standardisation of Coastal and Nearshore Demersal Fish Visual Census Techniques" (CoNCENSUS), which met between 2022 and 2026. REEF's Co-Executive Director, Dr. Christy Pattengill-Semmens, was part of the Working Group. The CoNCENSUS Working Group aims to enable the adoption of best practice guidelines and protocols for the collection, management, and curation of fish survey observations based on traditional and novel methodologies in order to provide recommendations on how best to utilise data from multiple methods to monitor and study coastal fish populations from local to global scales. Furthermore, CoNCENSUS will develop workflows and tools for the management, publication and visualisation of open-access data. which brought together practitioners from several different visual fish survey programs to evaluate best practices, identify datasets, and identify gaps.
This published study included a scientometric analysis of 1443 peer-reviewed publications (1953–2023), employing natural language processing and network analysis to map the research landscape. The authors identified 15 knowledge clusters, including marine protected areas, apex predator conservation, and reef ecosystems. Their findings reveal increasing use of BRUVS and ROVs in studies of marine protected areas and subsea infrastructure, while UVC remains prevalent in shallow coral reef research.