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The projects “Building Capacity for Coral Reef and Human Dimensions Monitoring within the Wider Caribbean” consist of a series of training workshops funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and aimed at strengthening the capacities of marine protected area (MPA) managers in the Wider Caribbean Region.
More specifically, these workshops train MPA managers and other stakeholders in the methodology for monitoring the health of coral reefs advocated by the GCRMN-Caribbean, a method that integrates biophysical and socio-economic data. At the end of the workshops, participants put their newly acquired knowledge into practice by conducting biophysical and socio-economic studies in selected MPAs in each participating country or territory, thereby contributing to the state of knowledge on Caribbean coral reefs.
Training workshops on GCRMN-Caribbean methods were held in Jamaica in 2017 and in Saint Martin in 2018. Participants in the first workshop came mainly from Jamaica. Those in the second workshop came from five Caribbean island territories: Saint Martin, Sint Maarten, Saint Barthélemy, Sint Eustatius, and Saba.
Two additional workshops trained stakeholders from Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, countries that make up the Mesoamerican Reef Region. First, a workshop entirely dedicated to the socio-economic aspects of the GCRMN-Caribbean guidelines took place from December 9 to 13, 2019, in Roatan, Honduras. Then, in 2020, a second workshop in Calabash Cay, Belize, was dedicated to the biophysical dimension of these methods.
These workshop gathered national representatives of the Healthy Reef Initiative (HRI) as well as participants affiliated with MPAs in Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, countries that make up the Mesoamerican Reef Region.
Finally, to increase the promotion of integrated monitoring, the monitoring process and study results are documented regionally by local organizations and institutions, as well as internationally by the GCRMN-Caribbean, to improve and guide decision-making.
