Our History

HIMARC was born out of the need to better understand the state of coral reefs in Hawaiʻi. Hawaiʻi nearshore waters are some of the most well-studied in the world, with multiple large-scale monitoring programs studying reefs and fisheries. However, monitoring effort is not evenly distributed, which leads to inequity in data availability and gaps in understanding.

In 2012, several people worked together to begin a project to fulfill a need for data synthesis in Hawaiʻi and first compiled fish data in 2012 and benthic data in 2013. From 2013-2016 the effort was expanded as part of the Ocean Tipping Points project that included generation of statewide datasets on drivers of reef condition. In 2016, the need for comprehensive monitoring and reporting of nearshore ecosystems grew as the Governor announced a statewide Sustainable Hawaiʻi Initiative at the culmination of the worldwide voyage of Hōkūleʻa and the creation of the Promise to Paeʻāina o Hawaiʻi. To answer this call, the early synthesis efforts were formalized into the HIMARC program which then pioneered unique calibration methods used to organize and compare the large datasets and make sense of decades of reef surveys, leading to one of the largest datasets in the world on reef condition. Today, HIMARC’s datasets, methodologies, and products are used broadly to understand the health of Hawaiʻi coral reefs by managers, communities, and scientists to inform effective statewide and place-based management of our marine resources.