Cayman to assist in studying non-human reef damage

From an article by Tad Stoner on Cayman Net News:

Next week, Washington’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will start work on a Little Cayman-based reef monitoring project, seeking to distinguish between natural and human-caused changes in the ocean environment.

The project, called the Integrated Coral Observing Network (ICON), will monitor a range of variables including air and sea temperatures, radiation, wind speed and direction and salinity in an effort to understand coral bleaching and other events that may affect the health of reefs.

The monitor will be built in the Bloody Bay Marine Park, where a yellow pole, approximately 30 feet high, will be anchored on the seafloor. Equipped with a variety of sensors, the data-collection system will transmit information to a satellite that will transmit to a NOAA site in Virginia for processing.

“They look for patterns in the data, and why bleaching might be occurring,” said Education and Programme Officer at Little Cayman’s Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI) Sally Coppage. “Because Little Cayman has a very low human impact, it gives [NOAA] an accurate view of what is going on naturally, rather than what is due to human activity.”

Describing the choice of Little Cayman for the project, a NOAA news release said Little Cayman’s coral reefs were “arguably the best in the Caribbean for research due to the fact that they are isolated from continental and anthropogenic influences, and support some of the most biologically diverse reef systems in the Caribbean.”