Development and implementation of a coral health assessment tool for St. John, USVI

Coral health in St. John, US Virgin Islands, has shown tremendous declines in recent years, with more than 50% declines in live coral cover. As one component of a group project to assess the possible impacts of anthropogenic development on coral health, a Coral Health Assessment Tool (CHAT) was developed using Microsoft Access ® and used to assess coral health in four bays in St. John. The tool builds on data management techniques that are currently employed by the National Park Service in St. John. The CHAT includes an Access form-based user interface that allows for random image selection and iterative analysis of still images that have been extracted from video of coral conditions. The database is dynamically linked to Microsoft Excel ® Pivot Table outputs that provide users with extensive data manipulation and exploration capabilities. The CHAT is constructed to allow extensibility and customization by developers and users. While this implementation of CHAT was specific to St. John, the tool's structure lends itself to further development and implementation in coral reef assessment programs worldwide. The health assessment employed a multi-parameter index, allowing bays to be ranked by relative coral health.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Detlefsen, William Robert

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• E. Eric Adams and George A. Kocur.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38938

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38938