2.0 About
2.0 About
VIRRS is the VI Reef Resilience Study. Reef Code carries its long-term reef monitoring and analysis forward across the U.S. Virgin Islands.
On this page
This section builds the benthic cover data layer for the study. The pages that follow read the raw survey records from three monitoring programs, reformat them into one consistent layout, cross reference the three separate benthic classification code systems into a single scheme, and calculate percent cover for major benthic groups and categories. Later pages then break cover down by major category, coral genus, coral species, coral trait group, algae, sponges, gorgonians, and other taxa.
The section writes the cover data products that the rest of the site and the publication pages depend on. Each analysis page saves a cover file at one taxonomic level (the s2pt* series), with matching metadata and a downloadable page source. These cover series act as both independent and dependent variables in later work, and they supply the values used to derive resilience metrics, so the numbers computed here propagate forward unchanged.
Data sources
Benthic cover records come from three long-term monitoring programs in the U.S. Virgin Islands: TCRMP (Territorial Coral Reef Monitoring Program), VINPS (Virgin Islands National Park Service), and CSUN (California State University Northridge). The programs differ in sampling structure, and that difference carries through every cover series on the following pages:
- TCRMP and VINPS use transect replication at each site, so their cover series support standard errors.
- CSUN has no transect replicate at the site level, so this pipeline computes CSUN as cumulative cover per site and shows no error bars for it.
- Record lengths differ: the VINPS record starts around 1999 and the CSUN record starts in 1992, so date ranges are not aligned across programs.
The derived cover products from these datasets (the s2pt* series) are written and offered for download on the individual analysis pages that follow in this section.
version 1.0.0 • in-review