GCRMN_COI_2017-Western Indian Ocean Reef Status

Coral reef status report for the Western Indian Ocean (2017)
Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network
a half-day special session at the 9 th WIOMSA Scientific Symposium (Durban, November
2015). The NCRTF focal points, assisted by a national consultant contracted by the IOC,
led the process of contacting national data contributors. Depending on the country, one
or two workshops were held to agree on how to bring together their data, analyse it, and
write a national report. These efforts were supported by the regional team, with CORDIO
coordinating the data and writing process and providing assistance for Anglophone
countries and Mozambique, and MAREX providing assistance for Francophone countries.
When required the regional team assisted the national teams in contacting data owners
and requesting their contribution.
A Data Sharing Agreement was prepared to secure data owner’s rights, such that the data
collected would only be used for this reporting process. Any further development of the
regional database compiled by this process will require a new agreement.
1.1.3 The data
For this analysis we focused on data collected using GCRMN methods of intermediate level
or higher. This is the principal recommended methods for monitoring reefs in the GCRMN
since the mid 1990s and based on the English et al. 1995 methods manual and other
GCRMN manuals (English et al. 1995, Hill and Wilkinson 2004, Conand et al. 2000, 2001,
Obura 2014). We did not include more basic methods typically used by citizen, volunteer
and community programmes due to compounding problems of accuracy and reliability of
data. Similarly we only accessed data voluntarily provided by the data owners under a
Data Sharing Agreement. Thus significantly more data is available (though not accessed
for this report) in the personal and institutional datasets of some scientists and institutions
(principally Non-Government Organizations) that did not submit data, and in the datasets
of volunteer-based programmes. Importantly data from early monitoring efforts has been
lost in some countries, emphasizing the critical need for securing data.
REGIONAL CHAPTERS
Given the challenges in using and sharing primary data – both for the Intellectual Property
and ownership rights of data providers, and for the complexity and variation in methods
and raw data types – we decided to use summary data for this report. That is, we collated
the mean value of a variable from a particular station or site, at each sampling interval
(e.g. percent coral cover). This is the level of data of primary use to managers and
decision-makers. While considerable information is lost in not using the variance among
sampling units at a site, we note that in most reporting for management and for national
and regional reporting, the variance within sites is very rarely reported or used. We refer
to the level we used as ‘site summary’ data.
With the additional consideration of promoting increasing open-ness in data provision
and access (see section 1.1.5), we felt a focus on mean site-level data will provide an
acceptable compromise between the rights and publication options of data owners, and
the added value of data sharing to the broader community.
We obtained data from 51 monitoring programmes or individuals and 70 datasets (Table
1.1.1), comprising 2504 surveys of corals, 1619 surveys of algae and 1491 surveys of fish
from 822 locations across the 9 countries (Table 1.1.1, figure 1).
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