Abstract

We report on a preliminary sampling and analysis protocol for the insular shelf of southwest Puerto Rico that identifies coastal habitats of particular significance to early life stages of representative species. This can facilitate fishery reserve designs that include habitats essential for long-tenn fishery production and ecosystem conservation. The spatial framework employed uses a cross-shelf habitat matrix with a vertical axis that includes a hierarchy of structural habitat types and a horizontal axis that includes an estuarine to shelf-edge gradient of geomorphological zones. This framework aids the quantification of areal habitat cover and size distributions of species within diverse sructural habitat categories across multiple cross-shelf gradients. Structural habitats or geomorphic zones can be collapsed or expanded according to data availability. Such attributes aided thedesign of a sampling program used to map substrates of key cross-shelf habitats in the La Parguera area of Puerto Rico. Representative fish faunas, i.e., those of trophic and fishery significance, were quantified by visual assessment after mapping transect substrates. This allowed the estimation of relative areas of differing habitat types and size-specific fish densities from transect-based visual assessments. Superimposing density data for differing life stages using available GIS datalayers of cross-shelf habitat distributions for the La Parguera area may yield a practical set of habitat selection criteria for the design of viable marine fishery reserves.

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