Coral reef monitoring for management purposes and the impact of marine protected areas on benthic communities on the Great Barrier Reef

Coral reef ecosystems are severely degraded worldwide. I explored two tools available to assist coral reef managers: (1) volunteer monitoring, and (2) marine protected areas. Currently, insufficient monitoring data are available to assess the condition of many coral reefs. When resources are not available for professional monitoring, as is often the case, volunteer monitoring may provide managers with important information about reef condition. To determine if a volunteer monitoring protocol can provide results useful for management purposes, I compared Reef Check (RC) community monitoring data, collected by scientists, to professional long-term monitoring data collected specifically for management purposes by the Australian Institute of Marine Science's Long-term Monitoring Program (AIMS LTMP). A RC survey at one depth (four 20 m transects spanning total distance of 100 m) was compared to AIMS LTMP transects (15 50 m transects, spanning a distance of 1--1.5 km). RC produced a similar picture of reef condition for major benthic categories and was adequate to characterize individual major benthic categories and parrotfish. This volunteer methodology can provide managers with a basic picture of reef health and indicate where more advanced monitoring efforts should be focused.;The efficient use of the RC transect-based protocol was assessed by performing multiple surveys at an off-shore exposed location and a near-shore protected location on the Great Barrier Reef. The optimum sampling effort needed to characterize individual fish, invertebrate and benthic indicator categories at both near and offshore sites was five to seven Reef Check surveys at one depth. Eight surveys were required to represent the substrate community as a whole.;Differences in benthic communities inside and outside marine protected areas were assessed using AIMS LTMP data from 15 paired sites on the Great Barrier Reef. Protected reefs had higher hard coral and lower soft coral cover than General Use reefs. However, non-random site selection during zoning of protected areas likely contributed to these differences. Temporal trends in substrate cover were strongly influenced by disturbance by storms or outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. Cover of hard coral and algae over 10 years were affected by disturbance, although soft coral was not. In contrast, there were no trends in benthic community cover associated with level of protection.