Integrating multiple species connectivity and habitat quality into conservation planning for coral reefs

By R. Magris, Eric A. Treml, R. Pressey, R. Weeks. 2016

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Incorporating connectivity into the design of marine protected areas (MPAs) has met with conceptual, theoretical, and practical challenges, which include: 1) the need to consider connectivity for multiple species with different dispersal abilities, and 2) the role played by variable habitat quality in determining the spatial patterns of connectivity. We propose an innovative approach, combining biophysical modeling with a routinely-used tool for marine-reserve design (Marxan), to address both challenges by using ecologically-informed connectivity parameters. We showed how functional demographic connectivity for four candidate reef-associated species with varying dispersal abilities and a suite of connectivity metrics weighted by habitat quality can be used to set conservation objectives and inform MPA placement. Overall, the strength of dispersal barriers varied across modeled species and, also across species, we found a lack of spatial concordance of reefs that were high-quality sources, self-persistent, and stepping-stones. Including spatially-heterogeneous habitat quality made a considerable difference to connectivity patterns, significantly reducing the potential reproductive output from many reefs. We also found that caution is needed in combining connectivity data from modeled species into multi-species matrices, which do not perform reliably as surrogates for all connectivity metrics of individual species. We then showed that restricting the habitat available for conservation has an inequitable impact on different connectivity objectives and species, with greatest impact on betweenness centrality and long-distance dispersers. We used Brazilian coral reefs as a case study but our approach is applicable to both marine and terrestrial conservation planning, and offers a holistic way to design functionally-connected reserves to tackle the complex issues relevant to planning for persistence.

Subfields: Ecology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/005ae486c92d828e2dee9d2a5c7a324b6eb86fe2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. S. R. Floeter
2. C. E. Ferreira
3. J. Joyeux
4. Luiz A. Rocha
5. A. Dominici-Arosemena
6. M. Wolff

In Oceanography

1. S. R. Floeter
2. C. E. Ferreira
3. Margareth S. Copertino
4. Luiz A. Rocha

Citations in the corpus

• A blueprint for securing Brazil's marine biodiversity and supporting the achievement of global conservation goals (2020, background): “Future work should encompass shifts in species geographic distributions, given the high sensitivity of marine species to environmental change (Pinsky et al., 2020), and identify locations that represent habitat refugia (e.g. Magris et al., 2015).”
• Biologically representative and well‐connected marine reserves enhance biodiversity persistence in conservation planning (2018, unknown): “The latter approach can overcome this limitation, allowing multispecies spatial prioritization (Magris et al., 2016; White et al., 2014), but the link with more direct estimates of persistence remains untested.”