Oracabessa Marine Trust (OMT) has partnered with the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) and National Fisheries Authority (NFA) to increase the capacity of Jamaica’s National Marine Protected Areas Network to conduct rapid reef assessments to generate data to inform coral reef management processes.
The project has evolved from a partnership between NEPA, OMT and Boscobel Marine Sanctuary to collaboratively conduct annual reef surveys since 2011. The partnership has created an extremely valuable longitudinal data set. In 2017 OMT staff members were trained in survey methods, which increased the efficiency of the monitoring program, as NEPA now only needs to provide a supervisor to oversee monitoring with OMT and Boscobel Marine Sanctuary providing most of the data collectors from the internal staff pool.
The capacity building effort is funded by the United Nations Development Program, Global Environment Facility, Small Grants Program. To date l enable more marine protected areas (MPAs) to utilize a collaborative approach to increase the available data on MPAs at the national scale in Jamaica. To date the project has facilitated a total of 25 certifications in Reefcheck and AGRRA protocols with participants from the NFA, NEPA and eight MPAs. With four months remaining in the project, additional persons are still scheduled to complete training and certification.
