[Coral-List] CoralWatch colour card Data from Caribbean bleach.

Justin Marshall justin.marshall at uq.edu.au
Wed Dec 7 18:35:38 EST 2005


>RE
>    1. Requesting Data on 2005 Caribbean Bleaching (Mark Eakin)

In reply to Mark's request for data - During this Caribbean bleach, the 
CoralWatch colour card coral bleach system (www.CoralWatch.org for details) 
had many requests for colour matching cards to monitor different areas. 
This should provide a quantitative and relatively uniform data set 
(depending on the exact method the colour card system was used in - 
transect, spot check etc) if we can get the data back from the 
participants. Judging from the requests it should be geographically spread 
out and hopefully provide some sort of temporal data also as well as 
species etc etc.

In brief for listers not familiar with the system, this is a pre-calibrated 
6-intensity scale (white to dark) in 4 colours that are close to most 
corals and usable when exact matches are not possible. It can and has been 
used in a number of different ways to monitor bleaching 'activity'. It gets 
you beyond "pale", "slightly bleached" and "probably not bleached" 
judgements which are both spatially and temporally inaccurate AND which 
vary with species.

This may be useful as an extra data layer to go in / near your severity of 
bleaching column Mark?

I'll use this general coral-list email both to ask you directly (Mark) if 
this data is useful to your needs and to remind the folks we sent colour 
cards to in the Caribbean to pass this data on - either directly to Mark as 
eg an addition to his spreadsheet or even within it as CoralWatchB1 or 
CoralWatchC4 in the severity column - and/or back to us at 
www.CoralWatch.org and we can collate the data for you and stick it in 
Mark's spreadsheet as well as our own data archive (open to all to view / 
mine).

Cheers - Justin

Prof Justin Marshall
Vision Touch and Hearing Research Centre
School of Biomedical Sciences
University of Queensland
St Lucia
Brisbane
Queensland 4072
AUSTRALIA

ph      -  +61 (0)7 33651397
fax     - +61 (0)7 33654522
mob     - 0423 024162 (Prawns in Space)

www.vthrc.uq.edu.au/ecovis
www.coralwatch.org




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