#Status of Coral Reefs 2002 - International Coral Reef Action Network

Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2002
OUTER SLOPE REEF MONITORING IN FRENCH POLYNESIA
A long-term monitoring programme has been launched to survey outer reef slopes on
15 of the 118 islands of French Polynesia to study the natural variability of the coral
communities and the influences of cyclones and bleaching-mortality events. These
outer slopes are remote from human impacts and the objective is to identify the
impacts of global climatic change and follow the predicted increases in frequency and
severity of such events. The results will be expressed in coral cover percentages to
show how outer reef slopes are affected by these events and how long they take to
recover. The results so far cover widely separated islands, some of which seem to
have not faced the destructive events, indicate that: 1) a healthy outer reef slope coral
community at 12-15m depth is about 50-55% coral cover; 2) cyclones are more
catastrophic than bleaching-mortality events (but usually more localised) and 3) it takes
about 10 years for reefs to recover from a major event.
Variability of coral cover on 5 French Polynesia islands surveyed between 1994 and 2001. A
cyclone and bleaching dropped coral cover on Mataiva and Tikehau in 1994; and coral
bleaching reduced coral cover on Tahiti after the monitoring of 1997.
STATUS OF THE REEFS
The major new information for this region is contained in the attached boxes. For most of
the countries, the status of the coral reefs has changed little since the 2000 reports and
there have been few surveys to assess coral cover data, fish populations and general coral
reef health since then. Progress in monitoring, resource inventories, and management has
been made in Wallis and Futuna since 2000, although French Polynesia has the only
consistent program to assess reef health and trends.
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