CCMA: Biogeography: Biogeographic Characterization of Fish Communities within the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary

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Biogeographic Assessment of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary to Support Boundary Alternative Assessments

Biogeographic Characterization of Fish Communities within the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary

A project formed from the National Marine Sanctuary Program - National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science Long-term Agreement

Objectives

The overarching goal of this collaboration is to provide the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) staff with information on the biogeographic patterns within the Sanctuary critical to decision making. This specific project will focus on the development of a plan to spatially and quantitatively characterize the benthic fish community throughout the Sanctuary. This collaboration will also include the initial implementation of that plan in the diveable portion of the coral cap environment.

Project Summary

The Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) represents the northernmost tropical western Atlantic coral reef on the continental shelf and supports the most highly developed offshore hard bank community in the region. The complexity of habitats supports a diverse assemblage of organisms including approximately 250 species of fish, 23 species of coral, and 80 species of algae in addition to large sponge communities. Understanding and monitoring these resources is critical to both sanctuary inventory and management activities.

Monitoring of the biological communities has taken place at FGBNMS since the 1970s. This work has focused primarily on monitoring the benthos with video transects and photostations documenting transitions between coral, algae and sponge communities over time. Until relatively recently, little has been done to monitor or characterize the reef fish community. In 1994 the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) began surveys of the Sanctuary and utilized a combination of REEF personnel, volunteers, and Sanctuary staff to visually census reef fish populations via roving diver surveys. These surveys have been invaluable in terms of species list development and understanding the ranges of these species. Subsequently, a stationary point-count survey technique was utilized to begin to quantify community metrics such as species abundance and trophic structure at selected locations. These data provide an important starting point for characterizing the fish community; however, they are limited in scope of inference to small portions of the Sanctuary coral cap environment and are therefore difficult to utilize in developing population estimates at the scale of the Sanctuary.

In addition to the relatively small area covered by prior studies, adequate spatial characterization of the FGBNMS has been hindered by the lack of a spatial framework necessary for developing an effective sampling design. Recently, the FGBNMS has completed development of a fine-scale habitat map suitable for stratifying studies of reef fish communities by habitat type. This spatially resolved assessment of the bottom types in the Sanctuary will provide the framework necessary to more efficiently characterize and quantify benthic fish communities throughout the Sanctuary and thus provide an important complement to the inventory work conducted to-date.