This paper is an inventory of fish and invertebrate monitoring programs in the US Gulf of Mexico, including the REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project, which has been active in the region since 1994. The authors conducted a gap analysis of the programs, and provided recommendations for improving current monitoring programs and designing new programs, and guidance for more comprehensive use and sharing of monitoring data.
The authors, Eliza Heery and colleagues at the Seattle Aquarium, NOAA, and the University of Washington, used REEF sightings data on Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) in Washington State to evaluate patterns of occurrence with urbanization. The species is the largest known octopus in the world, and they can reach over 20 feet in length from one tentacle tip to the other. The study objectives were to determine whether the distribution and habitat-use patterns of Giant Pacific Octopus were correlated with urbanization intensity on nearby shorelines in Puget Sound.
Lionfish derbies and tournaments were first implemented in 2009 with the intent of increasing public awareness about the lionfish invasion in the western Atlantic, gathering specimens for research, and training volunteers to safely and effectively collect the venomous species. Since then, REEF has coordinated a series of derbies each year and assisted other organizations and groups in organizing and running their own derbies, resulting in the removal of tens of thousands of invasive lionfish.
REEF fish survey data collected from Bonaire in 2015 were used to help evaluate the impact of terrestrial degradation on nearby coral reefs, specifically investigating the link between vegetation ground cover and tree biomass index to coral cover, fish communities and visibility. The authors found a positive relationship between ground cover and coral cover below 10 m depth, and a negative relationship between tree biomass index and coral cover below 10 m.
The Grouper Moon Project is always looking for new and/or better ways of accurately estimating the number of spawning Nassau Grouper at the aggregation sites being monitored. In 2014, we tested the use of a split-beam echosounder as a tool for surveying the abundance and size of fish at the aggregation site; the results of the study are detailed in this peer-reviewed paper. We found that the echosounder performs fairly well at providing an index of abundance, although the absolute accuracy of the method was not sufficient to replace other survey methods (e.g.
From 1958-67, Walter A. Starck II conducted marine biological studies in the area of Alligator Reef, off of Islamorada in the Florida Keys, these included extensive fish collecting. In 1968, he published A list of fishes of Alligator Reef.
Over the half-century since the original Alligator Reef survey, there have been great advances in the taxonomy of Greater Caribbean reef fishes, with numerous changes in scientific names and classification. As part of the update these changes are addressed so as to bring the list to current status.
In this paper, authors use data regarding where REEF divers did or did not encounter three species of fisheries importance: red snapper, red grouper, and gag grouper. They then combined these data with 36 other data sets, each sampling different areas of the Gulf of Mexico, and created distribution maps for use in ecosystem models of the Gulf of Mexico. These distribution maps picked up fish hotspots that are not identifiable by any individual data set, highlighting the complementary nature of the REEF data.
The study used REEF's Volunteer Fish Survey Project database to produce a new map of marine fish biodiversity across the Caribbean and tropical western Atlantic. The work, performed by scientists from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution & Climate in Denmark and the Marine Biological Association, studied REEF’s extensive data base collected by our volunteer surveyors to produce the map and find that fish biodiversity is strongly linked to sea temperatures.
Estimating a population’s growth rate and year-to-year variance is a key component of population viability analysis (PVA). However, standard PVA methods require time series of counts obtained using consistent survey methods over many years. The authors of this study used REEF data along with two other fisheries datasets to evaluate the long-term trends of rockfish in Puget Sound, Washington State. The time-series analysis was performed with a multivariate autoregressive state-space (MARSS) model.