- Email: [email protected]
New and emerging directions in coral reef conservation
Biological Conservation 241 (2020) 108372
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Biological Conservation journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biocon
Editorial
New and emerging directions in coral reef conservation
T
ABSTRACT
Coral reefs around the world have recently been decimated by successive years of worldwide mass bleaching linked to global climate change and the increasing incidence of marine heatwaves. Coral reef scientists, managers, and users are struggling to come to terms with the impacts of what is a very large-scale and seemingly unmanageable driver of change, at least at the localised scale of most management jurisdictions. Although coral reefs will undoubtedly persist in some form, sustained and ongoing anthropogenic disturbances have drastically altered their biodiversity, composition, ecological roles and functions, and ecosystem services. This demands a re-think of conservation objectives, directions, and approaches, including assessment of key management tools and approaches that we have relied on; and the incorporation of governance approaches that take a social-ecological systems perspective. This special issue, which presents a range of perspectives relating to coral reef conservation, will help scientists and managers to think through opportunities and constraints for coral reef conservation in a changing world.
1. Introduction Ecosystems and societies across the globe are currently facing a period of uncertainty and rapid change as a result of humanity's increasing environmental footprint. Global change in the world's oceans is a relatively new problem. Like other wicked problems (as defined by Rittel and Webber, 1973), anthropogenic oceanic change is hard to define and bound. It can be considered symptomatic of other problems; its causes are complex, interacting, and unclear (Hughes et al., 2017); the nature of proposed solutions depends on problem definition (and vice-versa); and it has no single obvious solution. Coral populations in particular have been decimated by back-to-back global bleaching events (Hughes et al., 2018), and climate change impacts are being further compounded by perennial anthropogenic pressures such as overfishing and pollution (Brodie and Pearson, 2016). Coral reef degradation will have far-reaching implications for other marine ecosystems and the > 500 million people who rely on goods and services provided by coral reefs (Wilkinson, 2000), but it is unclear how society should respond (Norström et al., 2016). The dilemmas currently being faced in coral reef conservation are, unfortunately, typical of those that will be faced in many other systems in the next 50–100 years (McLaughlin et al., 2017). Coral reef conservation thus offers a window into the kinds of problem that conservation biology and sustainability science will face more generally. As highlighted by Bellwood et al. (2019, this issue) the nature of conservation efforts will have to increase in both scale and complexity if they are to have any impact; and we will have to make clear, valueladen decisions about what to focus conservation efforts on, which will involve prioritisation of the multiple values that people hold for coral reef systems. Coping with greater complexity in turn means adopting a more system-based, more nuanced perspective on what coral reef conservation can and cannot achieve. If coral reef conservation is to achieve any kind of long-term success at broader scales, a social-ecological systems approach will be required. Such an approach emphasizes the interdependent links between social https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108372 Received 19 November 2019; Accepted 29 November 2019 0006-3207/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
and environmental change, and the importance of understanding the interactions and feedbacks between different parts of the coral reef social-ecological system and the ways in which they are influenced by spatial relationships. We can visualise the interactions between many of the key elements of this problem, and the ways in which each paper in the feature contributes to understanding it, using a simplified version of the robustness framework of Anderies et al. (2004) (Fig. 1). The robustness framework is a more process-based interpretation of Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) and Social-Ecological Systems (SES) frameworks (Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom, 2009); it can be viewed as a minimal model that captures the main elements of common property systems. We note also that none of these frameworks explicitly depicts spatial structure and scale, which have been identified as key additional elements in understanding and conserving social-ecological systems (Cumming et al., 2015). 2. Contributions of individual articles The general nature of the problem faced by coral reefs is summarised by Bellwood et al. (2019, this issue). As they argue, the single greatest challenge for coral reef conservation is that of managing the impacts of climate change on reefs. Marine heatwaves are predicted to occur with increasing frequency as the climate warms, and current evidence suggests that many species of hard coral will be unable to survive in warmer waters. Although coral reefs are likely to persist into the future under most climate change scenarios, they will be different from the reefs of today and may provide a quite different range of ecosystem goods and services. Thus, the impacts of coral reef change on reef-dependent human communities may be high; and our best hope for reducing these impacts is to act as soon as possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Changes in climate will affect the population dynamics not only of corals, but also of other species. The changing marine environment will create the potential for a wide range of new ecological interactions. Pratchett and Cumming (2019, this issue) explore the complex, multi-
Biological Conservation 241 (2020) 108372
Editorial
Fig. 1. Systems depiction of a generic coral reef social-ecological system, showing how the primary focus of each paper (indicated by name of lead author) addresses aspects of key components (boxes and circles) and interactions (arrows). In a typical coral reef social-ecological system, the reef is the Ecosystem under consideration; ‘Resource Users’ include local stakeholders who are dependent (in various ways; e.g., economically, culturally) on the reef; ‘Infrastructure providers’, such as a government (e.g. Marine Park Authority, local city council) or non-government organisation (e.g. local resource management committees) support activities by providing ‘Infrastructure’, which includes both the hard infrastructure of facilities (e.g. boats for compliance monitoring) and the soft infrastructure that supports and regulates resource use, such as institutions (rules, laws, taboos), social networks, and indigenous knowledge.
is exchanged between fishers in a four coastal communities in Kenya. This paper examines the role of co-management institutions in knowledge exchange, showing that these institutions can help to overcome social and cultural barriers to effective knowledge exchange, potentially aiding management success. Finally, Gurney et al. (2019, this issue) describe the first operationalisation and implementation of Ostrom's (2009) SES framework for conservation monitoring and evaluation across multiple countries. The paper outlines a standardised social-ecological systems monitoring framework for coral reef fisheries that was developed through a transdisciplinary process and is informing decision-making at multiple levels. Gurney et al. (2019) contribute to bridging the gap between SES science and conservation practice through providing an SES monitoring framework that can be applied to coral reefs and demonstrating how to operationalise SES approaches for real-world management.
scale controls on crown-of-thorns starfish populations, and the ways in which control of these coral-eating organisms may be achieved. Constraining or preventing population irruptions of crown-of-thorns starfish, if possible, will greatly reduce coral loss and increase potential adaptive capacity of wild stocks to environmental change. However, direct management interventions will be largely futile without immediate and drastic reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions. The creation and maintenance of protected areas will remain an important (if insufficient) strategy in coral reef conservation, and is the focus of several contributions in this issue (Cumming and Dobbs, 2019; Fraser et al., 2019; McClure et al., in press). Although the scale of protected areas is now smaller than the dominant drivers of marine change, protected areas can create zones in which other pressures on corals and their associated food-webs, such as over-fishing, disease, and pollution, can be minimised; thus reducing stress on corals and potentially helping them to adapt to climate change. McClure et al. (in press, this issue) compared fish and coral communities between fished and protected areas in the Philippines in the aftermath of a severe typhoon. While all habitats were severely impacted regardless of fisheries protection, protected areas continued to support higher biomass of fishes following the severe climatic disturbance, and thus may be important in providing resilience and maintaining ecosystem processes. Fraser et al. (2019, this issue) assess the ecological conservation outcomes associated with Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) and the role of notake zones in supporting fish populations. Based on collation of data from 47 studies of ecological conservation outcomes of protected areas, they show that there are no negative effects of marine protected areas; but the beneficial effects are not particularly apparent, mostly owing to limitations in the design and conduct of research studies that assess the effectiveness of marine protected areas. Cumming and Dobbs (2019, this issue) focus on a different aspect of the GBRMP, the role of permits as regulatory tools and the influences on spatial patterns in permitting. They found a dominant influence of human geography on permit applications in most permit categories, rather than of the ecosystem itself, providing insights into the geographic structure of relationships between soft infrastructure (‘rules-inuse’), resource users, and ecosystems in a marine environment. Ultimately, successful government and management of coral reef ecosystems will depend not only on understanding ecological dynamics, but also on coming to grips with the full complexity of human dependence on ecosystems and the indirect interactions that mediate human's interactions with ecosystems. Barnes et al. (2019, this issue) use network analysis to explore how information regarding reef management
3. Discussion This feature both highlights the need for new approaches and ways of thinking about coral reef conservation and offers some novel insights. A stronger integration of both people and nature is clearly both necessary and possible in coral reef conservation, using an overarching perspective such as that presented in Fig. 1 to explore and understand the ways in which different system elements and interactions fit together. The papers in the feature give a flavour of emerging concerns in coral reef conservation: for example, the uncertainties of shifts in coral community composition, the need to understand complex drivers and non-linear causality, the relevance of geography and spatial variation in conditions for coral reef persistence, and the importance of understanding how human social, cultural, and economic dynamics can be better integrated, analysed, and embedded in conservation processes. Analysing these concerns requires the use of approaches that have only recently become more prominent in conservation science, such as social network analysis, geographic analysis of social structure, and transdisciplinary research (i.e., involving collaborations among social and ecological disciplines and between academic and non-academic actors). There are also many un-answered questions in marine systems about the relevance of spatial variation for ecological, social, and social-ecological dynamics, interactions, and system resilience (Cumming, 2011). Looking beyond coral reefs, many other systems around the world are undergoing or soon to undergo rapid, extensive ecological change (McLaughlin et al., 2017). For example, cloud forests and rainforests are drying out and often burning (Anderson et al., 2017; Mutke et al., 2
Biological Conservation 241 (2020) 108372
Editorial
2017); wetlands face changes in precipitation (Dangles et al., 2017; Sofaer et al., 2016); glacier-fed river systems are under threat (Milner et al., 2017); and many coastal systems (mangroves, sandy beaches, rocky shores) face threats from pollution, warming, and sea-level rise (Ellison, 2015; Jiménez et al., 2017; Micheli et al., 2016; Short et al., 2016). Coral reefs are one of the first globally distributed ecosystems for which the disturbance regime will soon, and almost inevitably, have a return interval that is shorter than the time to maturity of their structurally dominant species. They will thus provide a first test case of our ability – or lack of it - to manage ecosystems undergoing a global transition, and a first global example of the conservation community attempting to mitigate impacts and facilitate adaptation in an increasingly novel ecosystem that will stray far from any known equilibrium.
country coral reef program. Biol. Conserv. 240, 108298. Hughes, T.P., Barnes, M.L., Bellwood, D.R., Cinner, J.E., Cumming, G.S., Jackson, J.B., Kleypas, J., Van De Leemput, I.A., Lough, J.M., Morrison, T.H., 2017. Coral reefs in the Anthropocene. Nature 546, 82. Hughes, T.P., Anderson, K.D., Connolly, S.R., Heron, S.F., Kerry, J.T., Lough, J.M., Baird, A.H., Baum, J.K., Berumen, M.L., Bridge, T.C., 2018. Spatial and temporal patterns of mass bleaching of corals in the Anthropocene. Science 359, 80–83. Jiménez, J.A., Valdemoro, H.I., Bosom, E., Sánchez-Arcilla, A., Nicholls, R.J., 2017. Impacts of sea-level rise-induced erosion on the Catalan coast. Reg. Environ. Chang. 17, 593–603. McClure, E.C., Sievers, K.T., Abesamis, R.A., Hoey, A.S., Alcala, A.C., Russ, G.R., 2019. Higher fish biomass inside than outside marine protected areas despite typhoon impacts in a complex reefscape. Biol. Conserv (in press). McLaughlin, B.C., Ackerly, D.D., Klos, P.Z., Natali, J., Dawson, T.E., Thompson, S.E., 2017. Hydrologic refugia, plants, and climate change. Glob. Chang. Biol. 23, 2941–2961. Micheli, F., Heiman, K.W., Kappel, C.V., Martone, R.G., Sethi, S.A., Osio, G.C., Fraschetti, S., Shelton, A.O., Tanner, J.M., 2016. Combined impacts of natural and human disturbances on rocky shore communities. Ocean Coast. Manag. 126, 42–50. Milner, A.M., Khamis, K., Battin, T.J., Brittain, J.E., Barrand, N.E., Füreder, L., CauvyFraunié, S., Gíslason, G.M., Jacobsen, D., Hannah, D.M., 2017. Glacier shrinkage driving global changes in downstream systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 114, 9770–9778. Mutke, J., Boehnert, T., Weigend, M., 2017. Climate change: save last cloud forests in western Andes. Nature 541, 157. Norström, A.V., Nyström, M., Jouffray, J.B., Folke, C., Graham, N.A., Moberg, F., Olsson, P., Williams, G.J., 2016. Guiding coral reef futures in the Anthropocene. Front. Ecol. Environ. 14, 490–498. Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Ostrom, E., 2009. A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems. Science 352, 419–422. Pratchett, M.S., Cumming, G.S., 2019. Managing cross-scale dynamics in marine conservation: pest irruptions and lessons from culling of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster spp.). Biol. Conserv. 238, 108211. Rittel, H.W., Webber, M.M., 1973. 2.3 planning problems are wicked. Polity 4, 155–169. Short, F.T., Kosten, S., Morgan, P.A., Malone, S., Moore, G.E., 2016. Impacts of climate change on submerged and emergent wetland plants. Aquat. Bot. 135, 3–17. Sofaer, H.R., Skagen, S.K., Barsugli, J.J., Rashford, B.S., Reese, G.C., Hoeting, J.A., Wood, A.W., Noon, B.R., 2016. Projected wetland densities under climate change: habitat loss but little geographic shift in conservation strategy. Ecol. Appl. 26, 1677–1692. Wilkinson, C., 2000. Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2000. Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville, Queensland.
References Anderies, J.M., Janssen, M.A., Ostrom, E., 2004. A framework to analyze the robustness of social-ecological systems from an institutional perspective. Ecol. Soc. 9. Anderson, E.P., Marengo, J., Villalba, R., Halloy, S., Young, B., Cordero, D., Gast, F., Jaimes, E., Ruiz, D., Herzog, S.K., 2017. Consequences of Climate Change for Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services in the Tropical Andes. Barnes, M.L., Mbaru, E., Muthiga, N., 2019. Information access and knowledge exchange in co-managed coral reef fisheries. Biol. Conserv. 238, 108198. Bellwood, D.R., Pratchett, M.S., Morrison, T.H., Gurney, G.G., Hughes, T.P., ÁlvarezRomero, J.G., Day, J.C., Grantham, R., Grech, A., Hoey, A.S., 2019. Coral reef conservation in the Anthropocene: confronting spatial mismatches and prioritizing functions. Biol. Conserv. Brodie, J., Pearson, R.G., 2016. Ecosystem health of the Great Barrier Reef: time for effective management action based on evidence. Estuar. Coast. Shelf Sci. 183, 438–451. Cumming, G.S., 2011. Spatial Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems. Springer. Cumming, G.S., Dobbs, K.A., 2019. Understanding regulatory frameworks for large marine protected areas: permits of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Biol. Conserv. Cumming, G.S., Allen, C.R., Ban, N.C., Biggs, D., Biggs, H.C., Cumming, D.H., De Vos, A., Epstein, G., Etienne, M., Maciejewski, K., 2015. Understanding protected area resilience: a multi-scale, social-ecological approach. Ecol. Appl. 25, 299–319. Dangles, O., Rabatel, A., Kraemer, M., Zeballos, G., Soruco, A., Jacobsen, D., Anthelme, F., 2017. Ecosystem sentinels for climate change? Evidence of wetland cover changes over the last 30 years in the tropical Andes. PLoS One 12, e0175814. Ellison, J.C., 2015. Vulnerability assessment of mangroves to climate change and sea-level rise impacts. Wetl. Ecol. Manag. 23, 115–137. Fraser, K.A., Adams, V.M., Pressey, R.L., Pandolfi, J.M., 2019. Impact evaluation and conservation outcomes in marine protected areas: a case study of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Biol. Conserv. 238, 108185. Gurney, G.G., Darling, E.S., Jupiter, S.D., Mangubhai, S., McClanahan, T.R., Lestari, P., Pardede, S., Campbell, S.J., Fox, M., Naisilisili, W., 2019. Implementing a socialecological systems framework for conservation monitoring: lessons from a multi-
⁎
Graeme S. Cumming , Morgan S. Pratchett, Georgina G. Gurney ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville 4811, Australia E-mail address: [email protected] (G.S. Cumming). ⁎
Corresponding author. 3
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Biological Conservation journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/biocon
Editorial
New and emerging directions in coral reef conservation
T
ABSTRACT
Coral reefs around the world have recently been decimated by successive years of worldwide mass bleaching linked to global climate change and the increasing incidence of marine heatwaves. Coral reef scientists, managers, and users are struggling to come to terms with the impacts of what is a very large-scale and seemingly unmanageable driver of change, at least at the localised scale of most management jurisdictions. Although coral reefs will undoubtedly persist in some form, sustained and ongoing anthropogenic disturbances have drastically altered their biodiversity, composition, ecological roles and functions, and ecosystem services. This demands a re-think of conservation objectives, directions, and approaches, including assessment of key management tools and approaches that we have relied on; and the incorporation of governance approaches that take a social-ecological systems perspective. This special issue, which presents a range of perspectives relating to coral reef conservation, will help scientists and managers to think through opportunities and constraints for coral reef conservation in a changing world.
1. Introduction Ecosystems and societies across the globe are currently facing a period of uncertainty and rapid change as a result of humanity's increasing environmental footprint. Global change in the world's oceans is a relatively new problem. Like other wicked problems (as defined by Rittel and Webber, 1973), anthropogenic oceanic change is hard to define and bound. It can be considered symptomatic of other problems; its causes are complex, interacting, and unclear (Hughes et al., 2017); the nature of proposed solutions depends on problem definition (and vice-versa); and it has no single obvious solution. Coral populations in particular have been decimated by back-to-back global bleaching events (Hughes et al., 2018), and climate change impacts are being further compounded by perennial anthropogenic pressures such as overfishing and pollution (Brodie and Pearson, 2016). Coral reef degradation will have far-reaching implications for other marine ecosystems and the > 500 million people who rely on goods and services provided by coral reefs (Wilkinson, 2000), but it is unclear how society should respond (Norström et al., 2016). The dilemmas currently being faced in coral reef conservation are, unfortunately, typical of those that will be faced in many other systems in the next 50–100 years (McLaughlin et al., 2017). Coral reef conservation thus offers a window into the kinds of problem that conservation biology and sustainability science will face more generally. As highlighted by Bellwood et al. (2019, this issue) the nature of conservation efforts will have to increase in both scale and complexity if they are to have any impact; and we will have to make clear, valueladen decisions about what to focus conservation efforts on, which will involve prioritisation of the multiple values that people hold for coral reef systems. Coping with greater complexity in turn means adopting a more system-based, more nuanced perspective on what coral reef conservation can and cannot achieve. If coral reef conservation is to achieve any kind of long-term success at broader scales, a social-ecological systems approach will be required. Such an approach emphasizes the interdependent links between social https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.108372 Received 19 November 2019; Accepted 29 November 2019 0006-3207/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
and environmental change, and the importance of understanding the interactions and feedbacks between different parts of the coral reef social-ecological system and the ways in which they are influenced by spatial relationships. We can visualise the interactions between many of the key elements of this problem, and the ways in which each paper in the feature contributes to understanding it, using a simplified version of the robustness framework of Anderies et al. (2004) (Fig. 1). The robustness framework is a more process-based interpretation of Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) and Social-Ecological Systems (SES) frameworks (Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom, 2009); it can be viewed as a minimal model that captures the main elements of common property systems. We note also that none of these frameworks explicitly depicts spatial structure and scale, which have been identified as key additional elements in understanding and conserving social-ecological systems (Cumming et al., 2015). 2. Contributions of individual articles The general nature of the problem faced by coral reefs is summarised by Bellwood et al. (2019, this issue). As they argue, the single greatest challenge for coral reef conservation is that of managing the impacts of climate change on reefs. Marine heatwaves are predicted to occur with increasing frequency as the climate warms, and current evidence suggests that many species of hard coral will be unable to survive in warmer waters. Although coral reefs are likely to persist into the future under most climate change scenarios, they will be different from the reefs of today and may provide a quite different range of ecosystem goods and services. Thus, the impacts of coral reef change on reef-dependent human communities may be high; and our best hope for reducing these impacts is to act as soon as possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Changes in climate will affect the population dynamics not only of corals, but also of other species. The changing marine environment will create the potential for a wide range of new ecological interactions. Pratchett and Cumming (2019, this issue) explore the complex, multi-
Biological Conservation 241 (2020) 108372
Editorial
Fig. 1. Systems depiction of a generic coral reef social-ecological system, showing how the primary focus of each paper (indicated by name of lead author) addresses aspects of key components (boxes and circles) and interactions (arrows). In a typical coral reef social-ecological system, the reef is the Ecosystem under consideration; ‘Resource Users’ include local stakeholders who are dependent (in various ways; e.g., economically, culturally) on the reef; ‘Infrastructure providers’, such as a government (e.g. Marine Park Authority, local city council) or non-government organisation (e.g. local resource management committees) support activities by providing ‘Infrastructure’, which includes both the hard infrastructure of facilities (e.g. boats for compliance monitoring) and the soft infrastructure that supports and regulates resource use, such as institutions (rules, laws, taboos), social networks, and indigenous knowledge.
is exchanged between fishers in a four coastal communities in Kenya. This paper examines the role of co-management institutions in knowledge exchange, showing that these institutions can help to overcome social and cultural barriers to effective knowledge exchange, potentially aiding management success. Finally, Gurney et al. (2019, this issue) describe the first operationalisation and implementation of Ostrom's (2009) SES framework for conservation monitoring and evaluation across multiple countries. The paper outlines a standardised social-ecological systems monitoring framework for coral reef fisheries that was developed through a transdisciplinary process and is informing decision-making at multiple levels. Gurney et al. (2019) contribute to bridging the gap between SES science and conservation practice through providing an SES monitoring framework that can be applied to coral reefs and demonstrating how to operationalise SES approaches for real-world management.
scale controls on crown-of-thorns starfish populations, and the ways in which control of these coral-eating organisms may be achieved. Constraining or preventing population irruptions of crown-of-thorns starfish, if possible, will greatly reduce coral loss and increase potential adaptive capacity of wild stocks to environmental change. However, direct management interventions will be largely futile without immediate and drastic reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions. The creation and maintenance of protected areas will remain an important (if insufficient) strategy in coral reef conservation, and is the focus of several contributions in this issue (Cumming and Dobbs, 2019; Fraser et al., 2019; McClure et al., in press). Although the scale of protected areas is now smaller than the dominant drivers of marine change, protected areas can create zones in which other pressures on corals and their associated food-webs, such as over-fishing, disease, and pollution, can be minimised; thus reducing stress on corals and potentially helping them to adapt to climate change. McClure et al. (in press, this issue) compared fish and coral communities between fished and protected areas in the Philippines in the aftermath of a severe typhoon. While all habitats were severely impacted regardless of fisheries protection, protected areas continued to support higher biomass of fishes following the severe climatic disturbance, and thus may be important in providing resilience and maintaining ecosystem processes. Fraser et al. (2019, this issue) assess the ecological conservation outcomes associated with Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) and the role of notake zones in supporting fish populations. Based on collation of data from 47 studies of ecological conservation outcomes of protected areas, they show that there are no negative effects of marine protected areas; but the beneficial effects are not particularly apparent, mostly owing to limitations in the design and conduct of research studies that assess the effectiveness of marine protected areas. Cumming and Dobbs (2019, this issue) focus on a different aspect of the GBRMP, the role of permits as regulatory tools and the influences on spatial patterns in permitting. They found a dominant influence of human geography on permit applications in most permit categories, rather than of the ecosystem itself, providing insights into the geographic structure of relationships between soft infrastructure (‘rules-inuse’), resource users, and ecosystems in a marine environment. Ultimately, successful government and management of coral reef ecosystems will depend not only on understanding ecological dynamics, but also on coming to grips with the full complexity of human dependence on ecosystems and the indirect interactions that mediate human's interactions with ecosystems. Barnes et al. (2019, this issue) use network analysis to explore how information regarding reef management
3. Discussion This feature both highlights the need for new approaches and ways of thinking about coral reef conservation and offers some novel insights. A stronger integration of both people and nature is clearly both necessary and possible in coral reef conservation, using an overarching perspective such as that presented in Fig. 1 to explore and understand the ways in which different system elements and interactions fit together. The papers in the feature give a flavour of emerging concerns in coral reef conservation: for example, the uncertainties of shifts in coral community composition, the need to understand complex drivers and non-linear causality, the relevance of geography and spatial variation in conditions for coral reef persistence, and the importance of understanding how human social, cultural, and economic dynamics can be better integrated, analysed, and embedded in conservation processes. Analysing these concerns requires the use of approaches that have only recently become more prominent in conservation science, such as social network analysis, geographic analysis of social structure, and transdisciplinary research (i.e., involving collaborations among social and ecological disciplines and between academic and non-academic actors). There are also many un-answered questions in marine systems about the relevance of spatial variation for ecological, social, and social-ecological dynamics, interactions, and system resilience (Cumming, 2011). Looking beyond coral reefs, many other systems around the world are undergoing or soon to undergo rapid, extensive ecological change (McLaughlin et al., 2017). For example, cloud forests and rainforests are drying out and often burning (Anderson et al., 2017; Mutke et al., 2
Biological Conservation 241 (2020) 108372
Editorial
2017); wetlands face changes in precipitation (Dangles et al., 2017; Sofaer et al., 2016); glacier-fed river systems are under threat (Milner et al., 2017); and many coastal systems (mangroves, sandy beaches, rocky shores) face threats from pollution, warming, and sea-level rise (Ellison, 2015; Jiménez et al., 2017; Micheli et al., 2016; Short et al., 2016). Coral reefs are one of the first globally distributed ecosystems for which the disturbance regime will soon, and almost inevitably, have a return interval that is shorter than the time to maturity of their structurally dominant species. They will thus provide a first test case of our ability – or lack of it - to manage ecosystems undergoing a global transition, and a first global example of the conservation community attempting to mitigate impacts and facilitate adaptation in an increasingly novel ecosystem that will stray far from any known equilibrium.
country coral reef program. Biol. Conserv. 240, 108298. Hughes, T.P., Barnes, M.L., Bellwood, D.R., Cinner, J.E., Cumming, G.S., Jackson, J.B., Kleypas, J., Van De Leemput, I.A., Lough, J.M., Morrison, T.H., 2017. Coral reefs in the Anthropocene. Nature 546, 82. Hughes, T.P., Anderson, K.D., Connolly, S.R., Heron, S.F., Kerry, J.T., Lough, J.M., Baird, A.H., Baum, J.K., Berumen, M.L., Bridge, T.C., 2018. Spatial and temporal patterns of mass bleaching of corals in the Anthropocene. Science 359, 80–83. Jiménez, J.A., Valdemoro, H.I., Bosom, E., Sánchez-Arcilla, A., Nicholls, R.J., 2017. Impacts of sea-level rise-induced erosion on the Catalan coast. Reg. Environ. Chang. 17, 593–603. McClure, E.C., Sievers, K.T., Abesamis, R.A., Hoey, A.S., Alcala, A.C., Russ, G.R., 2019. Higher fish biomass inside than outside marine protected areas despite typhoon impacts in a complex reefscape. Biol. Conserv (in press). McLaughlin, B.C., Ackerly, D.D., Klos, P.Z., Natali, J., Dawson, T.E., Thompson, S.E., 2017. Hydrologic refugia, plants, and climate change. Glob. Chang. Biol. 23, 2941–2961. Micheli, F., Heiman, K.W., Kappel, C.V., Martone, R.G., Sethi, S.A., Osio, G.C., Fraschetti, S., Shelton, A.O., Tanner, J.M., 2016. Combined impacts of natural and human disturbances on rocky shore communities. Ocean Coast. Manag. 126, 42–50. Milner, A.M., Khamis, K., Battin, T.J., Brittain, J.E., Barrand, N.E., Füreder, L., CauvyFraunié, S., Gíslason, G.M., Jacobsen, D., Hannah, D.M., 2017. Glacier shrinkage driving global changes in downstream systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 114, 9770–9778. Mutke, J., Boehnert, T., Weigend, M., 2017. Climate change: save last cloud forests in western Andes. Nature 541, 157. Norström, A.V., Nyström, M., Jouffray, J.B., Folke, C., Graham, N.A., Moberg, F., Olsson, P., Williams, G.J., 2016. Guiding coral reef futures in the Anthropocene. Front. Ecol. Environ. 14, 490–498. Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Ostrom, E., 2009. A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems. Science 352, 419–422. Pratchett, M.S., Cumming, G.S., 2019. Managing cross-scale dynamics in marine conservation: pest irruptions and lessons from culling of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster spp.). Biol. Conserv. 238, 108211. Rittel, H.W., Webber, M.M., 1973. 2.3 planning problems are wicked. Polity 4, 155–169. Short, F.T., Kosten, S., Morgan, P.A., Malone, S., Moore, G.E., 2016. Impacts of climate change on submerged and emergent wetland plants. Aquat. Bot. 135, 3–17. Sofaer, H.R., Skagen, S.K., Barsugli, J.J., Rashford, B.S., Reese, G.C., Hoeting, J.A., Wood, A.W., Noon, B.R., 2016. Projected wetland densities under climate change: habitat loss but little geographic shift in conservation strategy. Ecol. Appl. 26, 1677–1692. Wilkinson, C., 2000. Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2000. Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville, Queensland.
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Graeme S. Cumming , Morgan S. Pratchett, Georgina G. Gurney ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville 4811, Australia E-mail address: [email protected] (G.S. Cumming). ⁎
Corresponding author. 3