Pacific COREMO Training of Trainers: 9-11 September, 2009

COREMO is a database that has been developed to handle raw coral reef monitoring data (fish census, invertebrate and substrate) data. It has been developed by an organization called ARVAM in Reunion. It is designed to be fairly flexible, and while designed around certain popular monitoring protocols, it can handle some variations of methods that fall within these protocols.

The database has been under development for a number of years now, funded by the French Overseas Ministry, Reunion Regional Council and the EU. Some key players driving this process and identifying funds are Clive Wilkinson (Reef and Rainforest Research Center) and Bernard Salvat (University of Peripignan, France). The objectives are to improve data management in countries, provide people involved in coral monitoring with a facility to manage and conduct simple automated analysis and presentation of data and to allow data to be exported to another location for backup and to provide data to a public interface such as ReefBase Pacific to facilitate data sharing.

The Pacific COREMO database training was held at the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme facility in Apia, Samoa from 9-11 September 2009. Funds for this training were secured from NOAA through the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN). Countries from two Pacific GCRMN Nodes, the South West Pacific and Polynesian Mana, were represented and included Palau, Fiji, New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Samoa. Although majority of the participants were GCRMN representatives, there were representatives from partner organizations such as the Coral Reef Initiative for the Pacific (CRISP) and the World Fish Center (WFC) who assisted in either funding or reviewing the database.

The training program covered an introduction to the COREMO database, entering country coral reef monitoring data and general discussion on the pros and cons of the database. Fiji’s representative, Cherie Morris of IMR, thought that COREMO was a useful tool to store, organize, present and analyze data and will be using the database for the Fiji monitoring data.