This study demonstrates the important role that long term monitoring programs can play in understanding the natural variability and long term trends in the coral reefs of American Samoa. One benefit of this study is that it provides an overview of the condition of the reefs on all the main volcanic islands simultaneously. It also provides a broad scale perspective for understanding the results of the site dedicated monitoring programs in Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary and Pago Pago Harbour (Aua transect: see below), which provide a much longer term perspective on the reefs of Tutuila (85 and 25 years respectively). This dataset includes the status report (PDF and MS Word) and raw survey data (MS Excel) made in 1996 and 2002. Survey sites inlcude all islands of American Samoa, although remote atolls of Swains and Rose were not made in 2002. Surveys were also made in the country of Western Samoa.