National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Benthic cover derived from analysis of benthic images collected from climate stations across the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2019-04-26 to 2019-09-04 (NCEI Accession 0240338)

The data described here result from benthic photo-quadrat surveys conducted along transects at climate stations and permanent sites identified by the Ocean and Climate Change team across the Hawaiian archipelago in 2019. Benthic habitat imagery were quantitatively analyzed using a web-based annotation tool called CoralNet (Beijbom et al. 2015). In general, images are analyzed to produce three functional group levels of benthic cover: Tier 1 (e.g., hard coral, soft coral, macroalgae, turf algae, etc.), Tier 2 (e.g., Hard Coral = massive, branching, foliose, encrusting, etc.; Macroalgae = upright macroalgae, encrusting macroalgae, bluegreen macroalgae, and Halimeda, etc.), and Tier 3 (e.g., Hard Coral = Astreopora sp, Favia sp, Pocillopora, etc.; Macroalgae = Caulerpa sp, Dictyosphaeria sp, Padina sp, etc.).

Climate stations are 3-4 sites per island that were selected in a stratified random fashion to be roughly equally spaced around the island, along the 15 m contour, on hard bottom, and at least 1 km away from a river mouth or embayment. Once selected we assess multiple features of the coral reef environment including in-situ temperature (STR), seawater carbonate, net carbonate accretion (CAU), and bioerosion (BMU): all of which are archived separately.