BEAMS of Cheeca: shedding light on the resilience of a Florida Keys inshore patch reef

Fish swim over coral at Cheeca Rocks off the coast of Florida. Credit: NOAA

The waves lap at the bow of the RV Cable while glimmers of Cheeca Rocks, a bustling inshore patch reef, ebb and flow into focus below the surface. For eleven consecutive weeks, the Coral Program  at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) laid anchor at this long-term monitoring site to deploy and maintain Benthic Ecosystem and Acidification Monitoring Systems (BEAMS) that simultaneously measure net community production and calcification. These metrics of reef metabolism are critical to assess whether Cheeca Rocks is undergoing growth or erosion. With each data point, BEAMS is shedding light on the resilience of Cheeca Rocks, and this experiment represents the longest continuous bout of fieldwork to date for AOML’s Coral Program, spanning June 26 to August 29, 2024.