Biodiversity enhances reef fish biomass and resistance to climate change

Duffy, J. Emmett; Lefcheck, Jonathan S.; Stuart‐Smith, Rick D.; Navarrete, Sergio A.; Edgar, Graham J.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1524465113

Cited by 206 publications

(210 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Remote areas provide absolute conservation objectives often unsuitable close to humans and have an irreplaceable role in the protection of reef sharks as they host the largest populations. We do not dismiss the merit of MPAs in proximity to humans, with respect to the specific purpose of sustaining high diversity, density and biomass of key groups like herbivorous fish (MacNeil et al., ), or maintaining ecosystem resilience in general (Duffy, Lefcheck, Stuart‐Smith, Navarette, & Edgar, ; Emslie et al., ; Micheli et al., ). However, MPAs should not be assumed to provide absolute references for all aspects of biodiversity or ecosystem, particularly when easily accessible to humans.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Reef accessibility impairs the protection of sharks

Juhel

Vigliola

Mouillot

et al. 2017

Journal of Applied Ecology

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Reef sharks are declining world‐wide under ever‐increasing fishing pressure, with potential consequences on ecosystem functioning. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are currently one of the management tools used to counteract the pervasive impacts of fishing. However, MPAs in which reef sharks are abundant tend to be located in remote and underexploited areas, preventing a fair assessment of management effectiveness beyond remoteness from human activities. Here, we determine the conditions under which MPAs can effectively protect sharks along a wide gradient of reef accessibility, from the vicinity of a regional capital towards remote areas, using 385 records from baited remote underwater video systems and 2,790 underwater visual censuses performed in areas open to fishing and inside 15 MPAs across New Caledonia (South‐Western Pacific). We show that even one of the world's oldest (43 years), largest (172 km2) and most restrictive (no‐entry) MPA (Merlet reserve) on coral reefs has between 17.3% and 45.3% fewer shark species and between 37.2% and 79.8% fewer shark abundance than remote areas in a context where sharks are not historically exploited. On coral reefs situated at less than 1 hr of travel time from humans, shark populations are so low in abundance (less than 0.05 individuals per 1,000 m2) that their functional roles are severely limited. Synthesis and applications. Remote areas are the last sanctuaries for reef sharks, providing a new baseline from which to evaluate human impacts on the species. However, there is no equivalent close to human activities even in large, old and strongly restrictive marine protected areas. As such sharks deserve strong protection efforts. The large, no‐entry marine protected areas, close to humans, offer limited benefits for reef shark populations, but provide more realistic conservation targets for managers of human‐dominated reefs. The exclusion of human activities on a sufficiently large area is key to protect reef shark populations. However, this strategy remains difficult to apply in many countries critically depending on reef resources for food security or livelihood.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Reef accessibility impairs the protection of sharks

Juhel

Vigliola

Mouillot

et al. 2017

Journal of Applied Ecology

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“…These factors are not independent and can inter act but the most convincing experimental demonstrations of their interaction are based on sessile organisms that lack movement and aggregating behaviors (Hooper et al 2005, Cardinale et al 2009). Some reef fish ecologists, citing literature on plant diversity and ecosystem function have argued that species cause biomass to increase due to more efficient use of resources, particularly at the highest ends of diversity (Mora et al 2011, Duffy et al 2016). Yet, unlike sessile plants, fish are mobile and aggregate for purposes of protection, sex, and feeding; distinguishing between production and aggregation is challenging at the site and snapshot scale.…”

Section: Number Of Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing coral reef fish community biomass is a priority for biodiversity conservation in Madagascar

McClanahan¹,

Jadot²

2017

Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser.

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Elucidating factors that influence natural resources and diversity can assist managing species and their ecological functions. Key management options include protecting unique locations or implementing restrictions that more broadly protect ecological attributes and their services. To evaluate these 2 options, we examined 23 fish families in 152 unique sites in the Western and Northern Madagascar Ecoregion to test for spatial aggregation, environmental, habitat, and human influences on the fish communities. We found that there were 10 distinct communities of fish and that they were widely distributed in the region. Biomass and diversity were closely associated with the community types and showed weak spatial aggregation and environmental and market influences. Further, fishable biomass was only weakly positively associated with habitat characteristics of depth and soft coral cover and negatively associated with erect algae (R 2 = 0.06). Biomass was the strongest predictor of number of species whereas associations with light and hard coral cover were weak and median sea surface temperature (SST) and water depth had the weakest influences (all variable R 2 = 0.41). Given the weak spatial aggregation, environmental influences, high spatial and species variability, we suggest that there are few conservation priority locations. Consequently, for ecological representation and function there is a need for broad-scale spatial management that captures this heterogeneity and maintains reef fish biomass. The status of reefs in this ecoregion was fair with ~65% of the study sites having biomass > 600 kg ha −1 .

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“…In contrast, at larger scales, the field of biodiversity–ecosystem‐services research has been built mostly on correlative studies conducted in real‐world systems (but see e.g., Duffy et al. , Grace et al. ), where “real‐world” means communities that are not directly manipulated, in which it is difficult to rigorously separate the causal roles of richness, composition and abundance (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment , Cardinale et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relative importance of pollinator abundance and species richness for the temporal variance of pollination services

Genung

Fox

Williams

et al. 2017

Ecology

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TitleThe relative importance of pollinator abundance and species richness for the temporal variance of pollination services Accepted ArticleThis article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1002/ecy.1876This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Accepted ArticleThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.rarely accounted for common ecological patterns, most notably skewed species abundance distributions and non-random extinction risks, making it difficult to know whether experimental results can be scaled up to larger, less manipulated systems. In contrast with the prolific body of experimental research, few studies have examined how species richness affects the stability of ecosystem services at more realistic, landscape scales. The paucity of these studies is due in part to a lack of analytical methods that are suitable for the correlative structure of ecological data. A recently developed method, based on the Price equation from evolutionary biology, helps resolve this knowledge gap by partitioning the effect of biodiversity into three components: richness, composition, and abundance. Here, we build on previous work and present the first derivation of the Price equation suitable for analyzing temporal variance of ecosystem services. We applied our new derivation to understand the temporal variance of crop pollination services in two study systems (watermelon and blueberry) in the mid-Atlantic United States. In both systems-but especially in the watermelon system-the stronger driver of temporal variance of ecosystem services was fluctuations in the abundance of common bee species, which were present at nearly all sites regardless of species richness. In contrast, temporal variance of ecosystem services was less affected by differences in species richness, because lost and gained species were rare. Thus, the findings from our more realistic landscapes differ qualitatively from the findings of biodiversity-stability experiments.

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Biodiversity enhances reef fish biomass and resistance to climate change

Cited by 206 publications

References 60 publications

Reef accessibility impairs the protection of sharks

Reef accessibility impairs the protection of sharks

Managing coral reef fish community biomass is a priority for biodiversity conservation in Madagascar

The relative importance of pollinator abundance and species richness for the temporal variance of pollination services

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