Abstract

Eleven years after its initial arrival in 2011, the Caribbean continues to struggle with extraordinary volumes of pelagic sargassum advecting into the region from the North Equatorial Recirculation Region (Chávez et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2019). This phenomenon has resulted in numerous impacts, some positive, most negative. Sargassum itself, is not harmful but in such large quantities can pose a threat to both coastal ecosystems and humans (United Nations Environment Programme 2018). Forecasting sargassum influx events has become essential for supporting management efforts and adaptation to this new climate induced threat by determining the severity of impending sargassum influxes. This is particularly important for tourism and fisheries stakeholders who are negatively impacted by sargassum influx events and for entrepreneurs looking to develop businesses utilizing sargassum who need advanced notice of its arrival. Several forecast models have been devel-oped, but so far they lack quantitative validation. For example, the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies – University of the West Indies (CERMES-UWI) in conjunction with The University of Southern Mississippi provides 3-month sargassum influx forecasts for the Lesser Antilles island chain (https://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/cermes/projects/sargassum/outlook-bulletin.aspx). However, the accuracy of these forecasts remains undocumented. This study provides the first validation of the CERMES sargassum forecast model at the island-level using a full year of ground-truthing data collected at an index monitoring beach on the exposed east coast of Barbados using our standardized Sar-gAdapt Sargassum Monitoring Protocol for beaches (SMP-beach) to monitor the volume of stranding sargassum (Small et al. 2022).

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