Evaluating the effects of environmental events across both biophysical and social dimensions is important in establishing a holistic view of such events. This study focuses on the impact of a devastating heat stress incident that occurred in many locations across the Caribbean region and South Atlantic during the 2023 summer season. The survey and focus of data collection was within Monroe County, a unique nature-based setting south of Miami, Florida, USA. The impact of the heat wave is still being calculated at the time of submission of this paper, but indications are that there was a major negative impact. The survey and data collection sought to understand recreationists’ perceptions, knowledge, and behavior changes as result of the heat stress impact in the Florida Keys. Respondents were interviewed during community workshops in person and through an online sample of boating/angler license holders. The results indicated a change in behavior by some respondents, which may have a longer-term economic impact, along with trends of satisfaction with outdoor recreation over time. This rapid survey method can be applied to future scenarios where social and economic data are needed to fully contextualize environmental impacts in addition to biological endpoints.

This review presents a summary of existing visitor monitoring methods and relevant studies in land and marine-based areas, with a focus on the application to unique aquatic settings. Various opportunities and challenges exist with respect to the use of each method in different marine settings. These methods differ in terms of the complexity, costs, level of accuracy, and detailed information they provide. Furthermore, the feasibility of applying these methods also depends on the site attributes of a marine area. Since each marine area varies in geographical scale and environmental and social conditions, some methods will be more appropriate or perform more successfully than others in a particular location. Therefore, the consideration of these methods should be part of a proposed alternative process, focused on adaptive monitoring that scales to address visitor ebbs and flows in these aquatic areas. The proposed alternative seeks to develop consensus around quantitative goals for visitor monitoring and estimating techniques in marine settings, using a customizable mix of methods and techniques. This alternative effort progresses to subsequent tasks and discussions, and recommendations are made considering the feasibility and confidence of using these methods in particular marine settings and future pilot sites.

Florida’s coral reef is the third-largest barrier reef system in the world and provides valuable ecosystem services, such as recreation and tourism, erosion protection, and other services. Florida’s reefs have been declining due to impacts from climate change, pollution, and other pressures. In response, various conservation strategies have been implemented, including education and outreach, growing corals in nurseries and transplanting them to degraded reef sites, and deploying artificial reefs. However, few studies have estimated an explicit value for different strategies to attain conservation goals. Understanding economic values for reef restoration and enhancement is needed to help inform decision-making and support marine policy. This study conducted a stated preference choice experiment survey to examine the way U.S. residents make economic trade-offs among different restoration strategies, including increasing coral cover, deploying artificial reefs, and limiting visitor access to reef sites. The results suggest that, on average, the economic value of increasing coral cover is about twice as high as the value of increasing the number of artificial reef sites. Economic values for reducing visitation were similar to values for increasing the number of artificial reefs. These results provide essential information to policy analysts concerning reef use, reef importance, and economic values for reef restoration.

Despite being among the most valuable ecosystems on Earth, coral reefs face ongoing threats that could negatively impact the human populations who depend on them. The National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) collects and monitors data on various aspects of U.S. coral reefs to provide a holistic understanding of the status of the reefs and adjacent human communities. This paper explores results from the NCRMP’s first socioeconomic monitoring cycle using an ecosystem services framework and examines how these results can be used to improve coral reef management in the following U.S. coral reef jurisdictions: American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Florida, Guam, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Results suggest that residents in the U.S. Pacific coral reef basin may hold stronger cultural and provisioning values, whereas residents in the U.S. Atlantic coral reef basin may hold stronger regulating values. These findings suggest that outreach efforts have been successful in communicating benefits provided by coral reef ecosystems to the public. They also provide insight into which ecosystem services are valued in each jurisdiction, allowing resource managers to make science-based decisions about how to communicate conservation and management initiatives.