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Link to original content: http://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39374392/
Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on coral reefs - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2024 Oct 15;121(42):e2308605121.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2308605121. Epub 2024 Oct 7.

Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on coral reefs

Iain R Caldwell  1   2 , Tim R McClanahan  3   4 , Remy M Oddenyo  4 , Nicholas A J Graham  5 , Maria Beger  6   7 , Laurent Vigliola  8 , Stuart A Sandin  9 , Alan M Friedlander  10   11 , Bemahafaly Randriamanantsoa  12 , Laurent Wantiez  13 , Alison L Green  14 , Austin T Humphries  15 , Marah J Hardt  16 , Jennifer E Caselle  17 , David A Feary  18 , Rucha Karkarey  5   19 , Catherine Jadot  20 , Andrew S Hoey  21 , Jacob G Eurich  17   22 , Shaun K Wilson  23   24 , Nicole Crane  25   26 , Mark Tupper  27   28 , Sebastian C A Ferse  29   30   31 , Eva Maire  5   32 , David Mouillot  32   33 , Joshua E Cinner  1   2
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Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on coral reefs

Iain R Caldwell et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

The amount of ocean protected from fishing and other human impacts has often been used as a metric of conservation progress. However, protection efforts have highly variable outcomes that depend on local conditions, which makes it difficult to quantify what coral reef protection efforts to date have actually achieved at a global scale. Here, we develop a predictive model of how local conditions influence conservation outcomes on ~2,600 coral reef sites across 44 ecoregions, which we used to quantify how much more fish biomass there is on coral reefs compared to a modeled scenario with no protection. Under the assumptions of our model, our study reveals that without existing protection efforts there would be ~10% less fish biomass on coral reefs. Thus, we estimate that coral reef protection efforts have led to approximately 1 in every 10 kg of existing fish biomass.

Keywords: coral reef; fisheries; marine conservation; marine protected area; social-ecological.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Realized fish biomass gains from coral reef protection. (A) Medians (lines) and 95% quantiles (ribbons) for cumulative status quo fish biomass (solid line colored by protection category) and cumulative predicted biomass if all surveyed sites were open to fishing (orange dashed line), showing that most gains come from a minority of high compliance fully protected MPAs. Note that 95% quantiles are small, making them difficult to discern from the lines. (B) Medians (line) and 95% quantiles (ribbon) of recalculated total realized gains after successively subsampling fewer fully protected MPAs than were surveyed to more closely represent global estimates. The dotted lines and white point represent the gains from a subsample approximating a 3% estimate for current global coverage of fully protected MPAs on tropical coral reefs (SI Appendix, Table S1), whereas the dashed line and gray point are the gains from the surveyed coverage of fully protected MPAs. (C) Map of realized gains, with points sized by median gain, colored by protection category, and jittered to visualize overlapping sites.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Variation in realized reef fish biomass gains within protection categories. (A) Stacked frequency distributions of realized gains colored by management category, with medians (points), 50% quantiles (thick lines), and 95% quantiles (thin lines) shown for each category below the origin line. (B) Marginal mean realized gains predicted from each of the four selected spatial GLMMs (dotted lines) and the multimodel median prediction (solid line) for all represented nearest market gravities. Marginal mean gains are calculated from the difference between marginal mean fish biomass predictions if a site was in a big and old high compliance fully protected MPA vs. if it were open to fishing.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Potential fish biomass gains from full protection on coral reefs. (A) Cumulative potential gains if all sites were in big and old high compliance fully protected MPAs (dashed dark blue line [median] and ribbon [95% quantiles]; ordered from highest to lowest gains for sites that are not already in high compliance MPAs), and realized gains that would be lost if corresponding sites were open to fishing (dashed orange line [median] and ribbon [95% quantiles]). The y-axis represents the percentage gain (potential) or loss (realized) compared to status quo fish biomass (horizontal line at 0, colored by protection status). Dashed black line and gray ribbon are the median, and 95% quantiles of potential gains from randomly reordering sites that are not already fully protected MPAs (1,000 times) and recalculating cumulative gains. Dotted lines indicate the expected potential gains if 30% of the sites were fully protected MPAs. (B) Map of potential gains, with points sized by median gain, jittered to visualize overlapping sites, and colored by protection category.
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