ORAL - Brainard (talk given by Parke)

Though coral reefs are the most biologically diverse and complex of all marine ecosystems, they are also among the most threatened. Significant declines in key indicators of reef ecosystem health suggest a degradation of coral reefs globally in response to natural and anthropogenic stressors. With predicted increases in coral bleaching and decreased calcification rates due to global warming and ocean acidification, there are concerns that much reef diversity could be lost before it is even documented. As a result, scientists and managers will be left with a limited understanding of undisturbed reef communities on which to base future decisions. To effectively manage these ecosystems, it is critical to both obtain baseline biodiversity data and make existing data more accessible and useful. Since 2000, the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Division (CRED) has conducted long-term biennial monitoring of fish, corals, macro-invertebrates, and algae in the context of their benthic and oceanographic environments at 55 U.S.-affiliated islands, atolls, and reefs across the Central, Western, and South Pacific. In 2005, CRED partnered with the Census of Marine Life’s Census of Coral Reef Ecosystems (CReefs) project to focus more on biodiversity and expand globally. This ecosystem-based approach will facilitate integrated analyses of biodiversity across diverse gradients of habitats and biological, physical, and chemical environments. CRED has built an internal geodatabase for management of the multiple data types gathered during these efforts and the subsequent generation of synthesized information. CRED and CReefs are working together to improve dissemination and integration of these data with other coral reef data for effective and evolving global marine ecosystem management. With recent funding from NOAA’s Pacific Region Integrated Data Enterprise, CRED and CReefs will more effectively distribute biodiversity data via the Pacific Basin Information Node (PBIN) and Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), which consist of databases with data search and delivery capabilities that can provide geographically and temporally explicit selections of coral reef biological data in the Pacific region and globally. By combining coral reef biodiversity data sets, these efforts will fill gaps, provide insight into species ranges and connectivity, supplement baseline information with the discovery of new species and records, and serve as a foundation for the ecosystem-based management goal of conserving biodiversity.

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