Diario del proyecto Biodiversity of the Coral Sea Marine Park

One of the tools in iNaturalist is the opportunity to create online guides.
We are sharing the 'Field Guide to Fishes of the Coral Sea Marine Park, Queensland, Australia' by Smith, A.K., DiBattista, J., Tol, S., Kustra, L June 2024

https://reefecologic.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Fishes-of-the-Coral-Sea-Marine-Park-June-2024.pdf-copy.pdf

The purpose for this field guide is to increase knowledge of the fishes in the Coral Sea Marine Park and to document changes over time. The project was created by community (citizen) scientists for other scientists, citizen scientists, tourists, snorkelers, fishers, SCUBA divers, traditional owners, students, and marine park managers to increase knowledge. As the Coral Sea Marine Park is remote in nature, observations from any visiting the park are welcomed and encouraged.

It brings together multiple citizen science programs and the expertise of the authors that shared in observing several of these species while teaching citizen science tools to passengers during a voyage in the Coral Sea Marine Park in October/November 2023.

All observations are Research grade standard so they have been verified by two or more independent experts.

This guide contains 403 species of ray-finned fish and 10 species of sharks and rays. It is not exhaustive and we anticipate more species will be added and the guide will be updated.

Please use, share and provide feedback so we can increase knowledge and participation and ultimately best practice tourism, fishing and management of this amazing area.

This project was initiated to record and share citizen science observations from the remote Coral Sea Marine Park.

The project has received a significant boost of information with the 2023 Citizen science of the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea expedition A significant achievement from the staff, guest lecturers and passengers has been to share knowledge of citizen science techniques and observe, record and identify the biodiversity of the areas we visited. Thank you to guest lecturers Adam, Joseph, Toni, Samantha, Jo and Paul. Several of the participants took their first ever underwater photograph and the Sealife underwater phone housing was a great piece of equipment to make this easy.

Many new species records have been made for the region and particularly over 100 new species added to the Coral Sea Marine Park iNaturalist knowledge and project.

We propose to share some results at the upcoming Australian Citizen Science Association conference from 20 November 2023 at University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia- https://citizenscience.org.au/citscioz23/

We propose to review data and write some articles and publications and welcome input and collaborations

We acknowledge support from Coral Expeditions, Australian Geographic and Reef Ecologic for the expedition and acknowledge there are significant opportunities for communication in the future and welcome any support of time or finance to assist with future data entry, analysis, writing and publication