Download or read book Long-term Monitoring at East and West Flower Garden Banks, 2015 Annual Report written by Michelle Anne Johnston and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since 1989 a federally supported long-term coral reef monitoring program has focused on two study sites atop East Flower Garden Bank and West Flower Garden Bank (EFGB and WFGB) in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico. In 27 years of continuous monitoring, mean coral cover was above 50% and represented a stable coral community. Despite global coral reef decline in recent decades, EFGB and WFGB have suffered minimally from hurricanes, coral bleaching, and disease, and the reef supports relatively diverse and abundant benthic and fish populations. This report summarizes fish and benthic community observations and water quality data from 2015 as part of the annual long-term monitoring program jointly funded by NOAA’s Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The benthic and fish community surveys were conducted by a team of multi-disciplinary scientists using random transects to document components of benthic cover, repetitive photostations to document changes in the composition of benthic assemblages in shallow and deep repetitive sites, and modified Bohnsack and Bannerot (1986) fish surveys to examine fish population composition within designated study sites at EFGB and WFGB"--Executive Summary.