Obura2009-IUCN Congress report - Resilience sessions

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Workshop Abstracts reduce fishing pressure to allow the recovery of the fish community. To achieve this, the best available tool is no-take marine reserves, which have proved universally successful in recovering the complexity of the fish assemblages (PISCO 2008). Reserves are not the only solution, but they are an essential complement to the reduction of other local impacts (pollution, sedimentation), and global impacts (global warming) that will take a longer time to address. Biomass Productivity + Diversity 3D complexity Resilience - Fig. 3. Gradient of health/degradation of coral reefs, from pristine (left) to degraded (right). Most coral reef science has been conducte on reefs to the right of the canoe. Adapted from Pandolfi et al. (2005). References Odum, H.T. 1976. Macroscopic minimodels for balance of man and nature. In Systems Analysis and Simulation in Ecology, Vol. 4, B. Patten, ed. Academic Press. pp. 250-280. Pandolfi, J.M., Jackson, J.B.C., Baron, N., Bradbury, R.H., Guzman, H.M., Hughes, T.P., Kappel, C.V., Micheli, F., Ogden, J.C., Possingham, H.P. & Sala, E. 2005 Are U.S.Coral Reefs on the Slippery Slope to Slime? Science 307: 1725-26 PISCO Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans. 2008. The Science of Marine Reserves (2nd Edition, International Version). www.piscoweb.org. 22 pages S. A. Sandin, J. E. Smith, E. E. DeMartini, E. A. Dinsdale, S. D. Donner, A. M. Friedlander, T. Konotchick, M. Malay, J. E. Maragos, D. Obura, O. Pantos, G. Paulay, M. Richie, F. Rohwer, R. E. Schroeder, S. Walsh, J. B.C. Jackson, N. Knowlton, E. Sala. 2008. Degradation of coral reef communities across a gradient of recent human disturbance. PLoS ONE 3(2): e1584. http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001584. Sala, E. 2006. Top predators provide insurance against climate change. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 21: 479-480 Why monitor resilience and what are the challenges in developing a protocol? Paul Marshall The challenge Coral reefs are under unprecedented challenge. Against a backdrop of local anthropogenic stresses, including pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction has emerged the global threat of climate change. Already we are seeing the impacts, with over 16% of the world’s reef’s seriously damaged by coral bleaching events. Further change is inevitable, even if greenhouse gas emissions are stabilised. For managers, this means that coral reefs will increasingly be in a state of recovery, as disturbance events (such as mass bleaching) grow in frequency and severity. Therefore, managing for ecological stability is no longer an option: even the best managed reefs will decline as climate change progresses. The challenge for managers, then, is to reconfigure management objectives to focus on protecting the properties that enable reefs to cope with change. In other words, coral reef managers need to manage reefs for resilience. 18
Workshop Abstracts One of the major challenges for progressing resilience-based management lies in the application of resilience principles. While general resilience principles are influencing the way practitioners approach coral reef management and conservation, there remains an urgent need for protocols for assessing and mapping resilience in coral reef ecosystems. An operational framework for assessing resilience The first step in practical application of resilience principles is to define resilience in operational terms: resilience of what to what? This workshop deals with coral reef vulnerability to climate change, in particular to rising sea surface temperatures. Hence we are looking at the resilience of coral communities to increasing sea temperatures. The specific attributes of coral communities that underpin key values include the abundance (cover) of corals, their contribution to reef accretion and the amount of habitat they provide. Two general properties determine the ability of coral communities to persist in the face of rising temperatures: their sensitivity and their recovery potential. Sensitivity is a combination of resistance (ability to experience exposure without bleaching) and tolerance (ability to survive once bleached); recovery potential is the likelihood that a coral will be replaced in Management goal the community once killed. Together, Sustain ecosystem goods and services sensitivity and recovery potential determine the resilience of coral communities to rising sea temperatures (fig. 4). Management objective Maintain healthy coral communities For conservation practitioners and managers concerned with climate change, the capacity of coral reefs to sustain key ecosystem goods Reef attributes and services in the face of increasing sea Coral cover; reef accretion; habitat complexity temperatures is rapidly emerging as a focal issue. The array of benefits coral reefs provide human communities is vast, spanning Exposure recreational, tourism, fishing, shoreline Anomalously high sea temperatures protection, spiritual and biodiversity values. Ultimately, however, these values depend largely or entirely on the maintenance of Sensitivity Recovery potential healthy coral communities. One of the Resistance and tolerance of Larval supply, settlement fundamental (although often implicit) goals for corals to thermal stress success and juvenile survival coral reef management and conservation, then, is to sustain the provision of ecosystem goods and services through the maintenance Resilience of healthy coral communities. Ability of system to maintain coral cover, The purpose for measuring reef resilience is to deconstruct the various reef attributes and driving processes in order to focus our understanding of reef health, and manager’s attention on attributes and processes they can actively manage, and thereby improve accretion and habitat complexity in the face of rising sea temperatures Fig. 4. Conceptual diagram for operationalising resilience in coral reef management. Italicised text provides specific examples for each general concept the prospects for reefs surviving climate change impacts. Despite the urgent need and obvious appeal of resilience-based management, there remains much work to do in developing, testing and refining guidance for practical application of resilience principles. Initial work in the Great Barrier Reef has yielded encouraging results by demonstrating that resilience, at least when assessed at a local scale using generic indicators, is a feasible framework for coral reef planning and management. Testing of more detailed indicators by members of the IUCN Climate Change and Coral Reefs Working Group is also showing promising progress. 19
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