Abstract

The Healthy Reefs Initiative (HRI) is a multinational effort of over 60 NGOs, research institutions, donor organizations and government departments collaborating to enhance conservation efforts in the Mesoamerican Reef. HRI generates biennial, user-friendly Report Cards on the health of the reef and Eco-Audits that evaluate each country’s degree of implementation of management actions. The 2015 Report Card data were collected by 12 partner organizations and the HRI team. Surveying a total of 248 sites in 2013/2014, 148 were surveyed by HRI and 100 sites by partners including 86 sites in Mexico, 94 in Belize, 8 in Guate-mala, and 60 in Honduras. The Healthy Reefs Initiative is one of the first efforts globally to develop measurable ranking criteria for indicators of coral reef health. The development of a single index, the Reef Health Index (RHI), facilitates the mapping and reporting on reef health for a “big picture” snapshot of the MAR. Indicators are parameters or metrics of an ecosystem that relay relevant information on the condition of the ecosystem. They help translate the complex concept of ecosystem health into tangible, rigorously defined quantities by which changes in condition can be assessed over time. The mean value of each indicator is compared to the following thresholds and given a grade from one (‘critical’) to five (‘very good’) (Table 1). The four grades are averaged to obtain the RHI score for each site. It is important to highlight that a site with a given RHI score (e.g., ‘fair’) may have some indicator(s) ranking in different conditions (e.g., ‘good’).

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