How do coral reef and reef fish assemblages change with management regimes in Bocas del Toro, Panama?
Eager to leave my hometown and comfort zone of Houston, I studied abroad for a semester in Panama with the School of International Training during my junior year. After traveling all over the country, staying with homestay families, and taking courses in Spanish and tropical field ecology, our cohort was tasked with starting and finishing an independent project in the span of a month. I decided to take standardized photo and video data at three different sites in Bocas del Toro to quantify their coral reef and reef fish communities and wrote it up in a final paper. I found that site-specific environmental characteristics better explained the coral reef biodiversity present.
