Science: NOAA Unveils New Data Visualization Tool For Exploring Coral Reef Data

From a NOAA Release:

NOAA’s National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) launched a new data visualization tool, which will provide free and easy-to-access information on the status of U.S. coral reefs. It is the first tool focusing on shallow tropical coral reef data to be hosted on the NOAA GeoPlatform, which is NOAA’s central hub for geospatial data and tools.

Now stakeholders, scientists, managers and students have a one-stop information hub to access and understand NOAA’s shallow tropical coral data that they can customize to focus on coral trends across specific timescales, locations, coral or fish species, climate data and socioeconomics.

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Accessing data is a key component of this new visualization tool. For the first time, users can download streamlined data summaries for each available year at different geographic scales. Users asked for and received ways to filter and download data in an easy-to-understand format, allowing researchers and decision-makers to develop custom datasets with actionable, situation-specific information.

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The tool covers data collected since 2013 across four themes: benthic communities (corals, macroalgae and more); fish populations; climate and ocean chemistry; and socioeconomics. It encompasses the diverse range of coral reefs within the nation’s states and territories of Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. It also includes data from Flower Garden Banks, Florida Keys, and Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuaries, the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa, the Pacific Remote Islands and Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monuments.

Learn More, Read the Complete Release

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