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Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion

Coral reefs are important habitats that represent global marine biodiversity hotspots and provide important benefits to people in many tropical regions. However, coral reefs are becoming increasingly threatened by climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution. Historical baselines...

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Autores principales: Eddy, Tyler D., Cheung, William W.L., Bruno, John F.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786882/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29379692
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4308
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author Eddy, Tyler D.
Cheung, William W.L.
Bruno, John F.
author_facet Eddy, Tyler D.
Cheung, William W.L.
Bruno, John F.
author_sort Eddy, Tyler D.
collection PubMed
description Coral reefs are important habitats that represent global marine biodiversity hotspots and provide important benefits to people in many tropical regions. However, coral reefs are becoming increasingly threatened by climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution. Historical baselines of coral cover are important to understand how much coral cover has been lost, e.g., to avoid the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. There are few quantitative observations of coral reef cover prior to the industrial revolution, and therefore baselines of coral reef cover are difficult to estimate. Here, we use expert and ocean-user opinion surveys to estimate baselines of global coral reef cover. The overall mean estimated baseline coral cover was 59% (±19% standard deviation), compared to an average of 58% (±18% standard deviation) estimated by professional scientists. We did not find evidence of the shifting baseline syndrome, whereby respondents who first observed coral reefs more recently report lower estimates of baseline coral cover. These estimates of historical coral reef baseline cover are important for scientists, policy makers, and managers to understand the extent to which coral reefs have become depleted and to set appropriate recovery targets.
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spelling pubmed-57868822018-01-29 Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion Eddy, Tyler D. Cheung, William W.L. Bruno, John F. PeerJ Conservation Biology Coral reefs are important habitats that represent global marine biodiversity hotspots and provide important benefits to people in many tropical regions. However, coral reefs are becoming increasingly threatened by climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution. Historical baselines of coral cover are important to understand how much coral cover has been lost, e.g., to avoid the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. There are few quantitative observations of coral reef cover prior to the industrial revolution, and therefore baselines of coral reef cover are difficult to estimate. Here, we use expert and ocean-user opinion surveys to estimate baselines of global coral reef cover. The overall mean estimated baseline coral cover was 59% (±19% standard deviation), compared to an average of 58% (±18% standard deviation) estimated by professional scientists. We did not find evidence of the shifting baseline syndrome, whereby respondents who first observed coral reefs more recently report lower estimates of baseline coral cover. These estimates of historical coral reef baseline cover are important for scientists, policy makers, and managers to understand the extent to which coral reefs have become depleted and to set appropriate recovery targets. PeerJ Inc. 2018-01-24 /pmc/articles/PMC5786882/ /pubmed/29379692 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4308 Text en ©2018 Eddy et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Conservation Biology
Eddy, Tyler D.
Cheung, William W.L.
Bruno, John F.
Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
title Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
title_full Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
title_fullStr Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
title_full_unstemmed Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
title_short Historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
title_sort historical baselines of coral cover on tropical reefs as estimated by expert opinion
topic Conservation Biology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786882/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29379692
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4308
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