As I am writing this, some of our partners are busy in the field conducting training and data collection.
In fact, I will be joining our Micronesia partners for a SEM-Pasifika training exercise in Yap. This is part of ongoing efforts in this region to improve capacity and data collection. We should get reports from that exercise in the next SocMonitor newsletter. I also know that our South Asia Partners were busy in the latter stages of 2014 and hope to hear more on this work among others!
As many of you are aware, SocMon was able to procure additional funding support from NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program. This funding will primarily be used to support REPEAT socio- economic assessments in some of our global regions. It is important to note that we are trying to do follow-up assessments to see if we can track changes over time – that is, actual monitoring rather than one-off assessments. The funds will be administered through Maria Pena and Patrick McConney at the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES) at The University of the West Indies (UWI) in Barbados.