This study, conducted as part of the Grouper Moon Project, reports on the movement patterns and spawning behavior of Tiger Grouper during their reproductive season. Tiger Grouper is one of over 20 species of reef fish that are known to use the western tip of Little Cayman in the Cayman Islands as a spawning ground. This multi-species aggregation is best known for being home to the largest and one of the last known spawning aggregations of Nassau Grouper.
Citizen science is growing increasingly important for managers and conservation science. The REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project provides an accessible and flexible way for divers to contribute observations to a large database. This flexibility comes with challenges for analysis, but these challenges can be addressed with analytical models that account for variation in survey effort in time and space.
REEF was one of five citizen science (CS) project teams that participated in a multi-year study funded by the National Science Foundation to understand CS volunteers’ accuracy and skills. This paper is the culmination of that study, which included several facilitated exercises and meetings between external researchers and the project participants.
Long-term data are key to understanding how species, communities, and habitats change over time. Citizen science programs can support data collection at greater spatial and temporal scales than other types of scientifically collected data which tend to be project-specific and are often tied to short funding periods. This is particularly true for environments that are difficult to sample such as subtidal ecosystems. Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) citizen science SCUBA surveyors have been collecting fish, invertebrate, and algae data in British Columbia since 1998.
Early life history stages of fish have been shown to be sensitive to environmental changes. Given predicted changes in the coming century to the world’s tropical oceans, it is important to characterize how these changes will affect growth and survival of species with commercial and ecological importance.
First sighted in Lebanon in 2012, invasive lionfish have since become well-established in the Mediterranean Sea. In an effort to provide policy recommendations for the lionfish invasion within the Mediterranean Sea, REEF joined in a global collaborative effort with researchers from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean to share successes and failures from two decades of lionfish management in the Western Atlantic.
As part of the Grouper Moon Project in Little Cayman, Cayman Island, this study used the sound produced by Nassau Grouper, Red Hind, Black Grouper, and Yellowfin Grouper to monitor the positions of these fish during the Nassau grouper spawning event that occurred in 2017. By using fish sound recorded by multiple instruments, we were able to monitor the presence and location of these fish before, during, and after the spawning. These continuous and overnight records added valuable observations to the limited period of times when divers are able to survey the area.
The Salish Sea in Washington and British Columbia is home to hundreds of fish species, and REEF citizen scientists play an important role in documenting and monitoring the health of fish populations in this biologically diverse region. This paper shows that the REEF Volunteer Fish Survey Project helped monitor more than half of the total fish species known to occur in the Salish Sea.
Managing invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans and P. miles) in the Western Atlantic Ocean is beyond the capacity of natural resource organizations alone. In response, organizations have mobilized members of the public and citizen scientists to help. The authors used a structured survey to assess the activities and perceptions of 71 organizations that engage the public and citizen scientists in lionfish research and management throughout the invaded range of the Western Atlantic.
Designing effective local management for invasive species poses a major challenge for conservation, yet factors affecting intervention success and efficiency are rarely evaluated and incorporated into practice. As part of a multi-year study with funding from NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program and others, REEF and partners coordinated regional efforts by divers to cull invasive lionfish (Pterois spp.) on 33 U.S. Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean protected coral reefs from 2013 to 2019.