Guidance for Annual Reports Due Date: Sunday, 10 February 2019 Dates Annual Report Represents: The 2018/2019 Annual Report
I. Award Reporting Institution/Grantee: University of the Virgin Islands/ Richard S. Nemeth, PhD Award Number: 2018-2019-003 Time period: 1 February 2018 to 31 January 2019 Award Title: Are the two largest Marine protected Areas in the United States Virgin Islands working? Accomplishments and outcomes from this award: The initial time schedule to initiate field work was planned for September 2018 through July 2019. However, delays by UVI in completing the sub-award agreement (received 26 September 2018) and generating an account number for this project (received 29 November 2018) has caused some delays in field work. However, despite these delays we did initiate some surveys and have made progress on the project. The objectives were to compare several factors inside and outside two large marine reserves in the US Virgin Islands: These MPA’s are the Marine Conservation District (MCD) south of St. Thomas and Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICRNM) south of St. John: the four objectives include: 1) Determine if local MPAs are improving fish species abundance and diversity; 2) Obtain baseline data for top predator and key herbivore populations; 3) Evaluate extent of invasive lionfish in MPA’s and potential natural control of this species; 4) Document unknown fish spawning aggregations within mesophotic reef environments. Objectives 1, 2 and 3) i) Research permits have been received from NOAA Fisheries and are pending from USVI Department of Planning and Natural Resources and National Park Service. ii) Site selection utilized a stratified random approach, where strata consisted of targeted coral reef habitats, for selecting previously sampled historical sites in the MCD and new sites outside the MCD. We additionally randomly selected previously sampled historical sites inside and outside of the VICRNM. The sample size for this project targeted 20 sites both inside and outside each of these two MPA’s, but a total of 50 sites per location were identified in the event some sites are not suitable (Figures 1, 2 and 3). Initial comparison of MCD and VICRNM showed that depth ranges are comparable inside and outside the two MPA’s, but that the MCD sites were about 15m deeper than sites within VICRNM (Table 1). Percent coral cover inside the MCD averaged 25.6% and ranged from about 5% to 50% (Table 1). Average percent coral cover outside the VICRNM was four times higher than inside (Table 1), and ranged from 0% to 80% and 50%, respectively.
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