Caribbean Coastal Marine Productivity Program

The Caribbean Coastal Marine Productivity (CARICOMP) Program is a regional scientific effort to study land-sea interaction processes, monitor for change, and provide appropriate scientific information for management. The Program focuses on understanding the productivity, structure and functions of three important coastal ecosystems: mangroves, seagrasses and reefs. CARICOMP was launched in response to the need for long-term, region-wide comparative studies of the biodiversity and productivity of Caribbean coastal ecosystems within the COMAR (Coastal Marine) project, established by the general Conference of UNESCO in 1980. The program was developed through various planning sessions and visits to potential funding sources, starting with a first workshop in 1982 at the St. Croix West Indies Marine Laboratory in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Within the wider Caribbean region there is a general consensus that in many localities these coastal systems are changing for the worse. The ultimate causes are explosive population growth and anthropogenically driven changes, including heavy tourism development. Because the underlying causes of this decline are diverse, there is no agreement on how the ecosystems can be stabilized and restored, or even on what constitutes sustainable development.

The program was therefore conceived as a Caribbean-wide initiative to identify the factors responsible for sustaining mangroves, seagrass meadows and coral reef productivity, to examine the interaction between these ecosystems, and to determine the role of the terrestrial and oceanic influence on them. Scientific monitoring of these three ecosystems is performed on a daily, weekly and twice annual basis throughout the region using the same monitoring protocol. Twenty-nine marine laboratories, parks and reserves, in 13 islands and 9 mainland countries have now joined the CARICOMP Program which has a central Data Management Centre (DMC) at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. Summaries of all data are distributed to each site by the DMC, which also coordinates investigations of transient regional phenomena, such as mortality in sea fans and coral bleaching.