Methods

Data included meeting minutes (i.e., transcripts recorded during advisory council/committee meetings), news documents (including newspaper articles, press releases, newspaper blogs and news transcripts), and remote interviews with representatives and participating stakeholders from the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Using the appearance of mass coral bleaching events along the Florida Reef Tract as a temporal threshold, denoting a shift from historical to contemporary ecosystem functionality and management needs, I compiled a total of 1,122 individual data points (n = 1,122) from both organizations, FKNMS (n = 541) and SEFCRI (n = 581), throughout the summer of 2021.

News document data were collected from the Nexis Uni database, which initially revealed over 10,000 results when searching “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” or “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative.” However, many of these results were irrelevant within the scope of this study; therefore, modifiers were added to narrow the search results. First, for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, 179 documents were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” AND “management.” These results were then filtered using the category “Newspapers” and the date range “1996 - present.” The reason I focused on newspaper articles was to make the amount of FKNMS news data more manageable. Additionally, 1996 was selected as a starting point because the first mass bleaching event to occur in Florida after the creation of the FKNMS was in 1997. Of the 179 results, 79 were deemed relevant to this study, and 100 were excluded. The results were manually sorted to determine their relevance to this research. Any articles that were outside the scope of this study were therefore excluded. For example, one article focused on new funding for habitat restoration in the Everglades National Park and mentioned both the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and “management” in that context. However, this had no direct relevance to the management of the Florida Reef Tract (Wadlow, 2010).

Second, for the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative, 99 results were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative” OR “SEFCRI” OR “Ecosystem Conservation Area.” Because SEFCRI is a newer organization (established in 2003), there was no need to limit the date range.