Maximizing the Efficiency of Reef Fish Surveys Through Incorporating Habitat Stratification Into Survey Design

Several new or expanded fishery-independent surveys have recently been implemented to provide data for reef fishes along the southeast United States coast.  We present an overview of the development of monitoring efforts initiated by the state of Florida and early results that highlight the challenges associated with the design and implementation of a broad-scale survey of reef-fish assemblages.  The greatest logistical challenge has been locating reef habitat due to the lack of high-resolution habitat data for the West Florida Shelf survey area.  Under pressures to provide immediate data, initial survey efforts relied on broad-scale and outdated habitat information; accordingly, analyses of early data require extensive post-stratification to identify and exclude the large proportion of sites that were not actually reef habitat.  This survey was later improved by adding mapping surveys to identify reef habitat prior to sampling.  Although this approach has greatly reduced the proportion of sites that fall on non-reef habitat, post-stratification based on habitat type is still required to maximize the precision of relative abundance indices.  Results from a small-scale pilot study indicate that survey efficiency can be greatly improved through incorporating habitat-based pre-stratification, and planned efforts to transition to such an approach will be discussed.