Reef Futures

Reef Futures The future of reef services in the Anthropocene: Newsletter 02

Photo credit: Brook Peterson / Coral Reef Image Bank

Welcome!

Welcome to the second Reef Futures e-newsletter! Here you will be able to find out about the Reef Futures project, who is involved, what we've been up to this past year, what we are planning for the upcoming year and why we are doing it.

Introduction

Coral Reefs are extremely important for life on planet. They host an abundant biodiversity that shelters marine species and provides food, raw materials, spiritual value and medicine to humans. Shallow reefs, for example, support a quarter of marine life and provides a plethora of benefits for people and nature, estimated at USD 375 billion annually.

However, a third of reef forming corals and the ecosystems they deliver are threatened by human actions. Sustainable development is needed to ensure the conservation of coral reefs and the biodiversity they support, and to increase the wellbeing of people who depend on shallow reefs.

To achieve this, we must consider human and natural systems together. This requires an integrated scenario for understanding the future of the complex dynamics of shallow reef ecological systems and our social systems. This would support informed decisions to undertake transformational change to protect coral reefs and the benefits they deliver for people and nature.

For this reason, the Reef Futures project works to explore the ecosystem services of coral reefs under different scenarios to better anticipate their futures within a context of global change. It aims to explore win-win scenarios where key shallow reefs ecosystem services are secured around the world under a changing climate.

Photo credit: Yen-yi Lee / Coral Reef Image Bank

2020 was a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

How we worked in 2020

The Reef Futures is a four-year collaboration of 19 partners that undertakes two main areas of work:

Understanding the following ecosystem services: nutrition, livelihoods, nutrient cycling, carbon cycling and cultural values.
Predicting the future of these ecosystem services to help inform decision making and improve the management of our vulnerable coral reefs.

2020 was a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. The way we worked had to change as our team members and project partners were no longer able to travel to collect data and process samples for analysis. The pandemic disrupted field science and a series of important events were also cancelled.

Reef Futures partners found ways to still make meaningful contributions to conservation practice by adapting and making the best of online events. For example, an internal WCS Coral Reef webinar series had more people and more countries joining than would have if it were an in-person meeting.

Keeping in touch with communities hit by COVID-19

The Reef Futures partners work closely with people, particularly coastal communities who own and steward their local resources. Just as we take years to evaluate the impact of human action on coral reefs, our partnerships with these communities are long-term relationships spanning years and decades. Our commitment to these communities, therefore, did not stop during the COVID-19 crisis. COVID-19 shed light on the importance of conservation and sustainable resource management. Protecting ecosystems and the communities that depend on them for their livelihoods is urgent.

As global supply chains struggle around the world due to COVID-19, local food is more important than ever. For many coastal communities, food comes from farming and fisheries. Our work as conservationists to ensure that local resource management delivers joint benefits for people and nature essential. We engage closely with communities to prioritise science that responds to their most urgent local problems.

Dr. Emily Darling, a conservation scientist with Reef Futures partner organisation WCS, wrote about how field teams adapted to the pandemic and changed the way they worked to better serve the communities.

Read Dr. Emily Darling's full story here.

Photo credit: Raquel C. Bagnol / Coral Reef Image Bank

Understanding ecological and socio-economic dynamics of reefs

by Kara E. Pellowe

Model development is underway for a social-ecological systems (SES) model, a model that will represent coral reefs as systems composed of many interacting parts, including ecological, environmental, social, and economic dimensions. The development of the model has been a collaborative process together with the teams working on ecosystem service estimates.

The SES model will help us understand how human activities, like fishing and tourism, affect reef ecosystems, and vice versa. It will also reveal how the services provided by reefs can help shape reef fish communities and human development. This is an essential step in predicting how ecosystem services may change under future scenarios. The SES model will reveal the processes that explain why we see more ecosystem services in some reefs and not others. It will also allow us to identify which policy interventions may be best suited to different reef contexts, with the aim of improving ecosystem service delivery in the future.

Visualisation of reef social-ecological systems model, showing several key dimensions and interactions included in the model

Photo credit: Kimberly Jeffries / Coral Reef Image Bank

Stories from the water

Reef Futures team members Dr. Sonia Bejarano and Mattia Ghilardi, from ZMT, took on a three-months field campaign in Palau, an island country in the western Pacific Ocean. The journey, that ended in early 2020, was aimed at building a dataset of carbonate production rates covering numerous species and families by collecting carbonate pellets excreted by starved fishes kept in separate tanks at local environmental conditions. This would provide evidence for Mattia’s larger PhD project, which focuses on the contribution of reef fishes to the inorganic carbon cycle through the excretion of carbonates.

Data on the marketed reef fish species and the consumption preferences of the inhabitants of Palau were also collected by photographing fishes at the local fish market, gathering information on their prices and conducting interviews with customers, restaurants and hotels. This information was integrated in his project to classify species based on their ecological and socio-economic relevance in order to provide support for new and current conservation measures.

The Reef Systems Research Group at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) recently concluded the lab analysis of the samples collected and substantially expanded the global dataset of carbonate excretion rates available for coral reef fishes.

The samples from Palau were successfully analysed for their morphological and mineralogical composition through SEM, EDX and FTIR analyses and the amount of carbonate excreted by individual fishes was quantified by titration and then converted to carbonate excretion rate. A predictive model of carbonate excretion rates based on biological and environmental variables was finally built to quantify reef fish contribution to inorganic carbon cycling on a global scale.

The second field expedition had to be postponed due to COVID-19 and may take place between May-June 2021 at the CRIOBE in Moorea, where carbonate production and composition will be assessed for fishes exposed to different temperatures and CO2 levels.

A manuscript investigating the drivers of reef fish intestinal morphology was recently submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and is currently in review. This paper lays important foundations for the modelling of carbonate excretion rates.

Assembling benthic community data to assess the effect of habitat condition on reef ecosystem services

by Katie Cramer, Assistant Research Professor, Arizona State University

Gaps in benthic data are continuing to be filled by a team of students that are scoring Reef Life Survey benthic photoquadrats online. To date, 78% of the surveys in the Reef Futures dataset that contain benthic photoquadrats have been scored. When surveys from Australia are excluded (this region has been de-prioritized for benthic data collection due to its high coverage in the Reef Futures dataset), 97% of surveys in the Reef Futures dataset that contain benthic photoquadrats have been scored.

Assessing the potential for market interventions to increase the sustainability of coral reef fisheries

by Katie Cramer, Assistant Research Professor, Arizona State University; and Jack Kittinger, from Conservation International / ASU

Coral reef fisheries are increasingly becoming commercialized, as shown by the increase in global catch in industrial and artisanal reef fisheries sectors. Market tools for increasing sustainable fishing practices may therefore be appropriate for some reef fisheries. Data compiled from Sea Around Us Project.

Market-based tools to encourage sustainable fishing practices are being widely adopted in large scale, non-reef fisheries, but are largely unexplored for coral reef fisheries. This project assesses:

(1) the degree to which coral reef seafood enters markets and may therefore be amenable to market interventions;

(2) the suite of market interventions that hold promise for reef fisheries under select environmental and social contexts.

This analysis found that reef fisheries are increasingly becoming commercialized (figure below) and that carefully chosen interventions may improve sustainability in some cases. For example, certification and ratings efforts, fishery improvement projects, and sustainable purchasing commitments hold promise for export-oriented fisheries for highly fecund invertebrates, while sustainable purchasing commitments, consumer awareness campaigns, and local certification and ratings schemes hold promise for fisheries targeting species for domestic or regional consumption.

Fisher empowerment efforts including direct access to local markets and market information, training on improved post-harvest methods, and formation of fisher associations hold promise for increasing fisher incomes and de-incentivizing unsustainable practices in several types of reef fisheries. This work is currently in review at the journal People and Nature.

Education and markets vital for coastal fishing communities

Climate change is expected to reinforce undesirable social and ecological feedbacks between ecosystem degradation and poverty. This is particularly true for resource-dependent communities in the developing world such as coral reef fishing communities who will have to adapt to those new environmental conditions and novel ecosystems.

The study 'Multiscale determinants of social adaptive capacity in small-scale fishing communities’, published by WCS scientists in June 2020, indicated that, to enable these communities to adapt and endure to change, from global warming to a global pandemic, it is crucial to identify:

i) multiscale characteristics that can influence social adaptive capacity of local communities to climate change, and

ii) current and future social-ecological conditions related to climate change that might lead communities to experience unsustainable and undesirable states (i.e., “social-ecological traps”).

In order to achieve the results, the study investigated social adaptive capacity and the relationship to ecological conditions in 29 small-scale fishing communities in Madagascar and Kenya in the Western Indian Ocean. It found that isolation from a market, in addition to climate stress, had a significant negative relationship with social adaptive capacity, while a higher level of education and the presence of market traders (middlemen) had a positive relationship.

Our findings reveal specific mechanisms by which conservation and development activities can increase social adaptive capacity in coastal communities, including but not limited to: increasing market access and education, and mitigating future climate exposure and unsustainable fishing through improved marine conservation and management.

Read the study here.

Photo credit: Martin Cologni / Coral Reef Image Bank

Predicting the future of ecosystem services

In 2020, WCS launched its second MERMAID app, a global dashboard that helps marine scientists understand and visualise data by providing a global snapshot of the health of the world’s reefs. MERMAID (Marine Ecological Research Management AID) is an open-source tech platform made up of three tools: the first, launched in 2019, is a collection app, which allows scientists to quickly and easily input complex reef data from the field. The second is an interactive map that provides an insider’s view of the ecosystem data collected from coral reefs by field scientists around the world. The third will focus on streamlined analysis and statistical reports so MERMAID users can easily share their findings with governments, communities, and peers.

In the year since going public, field scientists across ten countries have input their monitoring expedition data from nearly 10,000 transects and >1,200 sites. Over 570 users have registered for MERMAID from 41 organizations around the world, including government agencies, nonprofits, and universities.

The platform now houses thousands of data points, allowing organizations and governments to monitor the impacts of climate change on vital reef ecosystems. This data helps us identify the world’s remaining functioning coral reefs, allowing us to strategically focus conservation efforts where they are most needed, while also providing insights used to support the recovery of struggling reefs to maintain livelihoods and food security for local communities.

Developed in partnership by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Sparkgeo, MERMAID is a first-of-its-kind free, online-offline platform that allows scientists anywhere in the world to collect, analyse, and share field-based coral reef surveys.

Access the app at datamermaid.org

Photo credit: François Baelen / Coral Reef Image Bank