Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands

By Stuart Sandin, J. Smith, E. DeMartini, E. Dinsdale, S. Donner, A. Friedlander, T. Konotchick, Machel Malay, J. Maragos, David Obura and 9 more. PLoS ONE, 2008

889 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Effective conservation requires rigorous baselines of pristine conditions to assess the impacts of human activities and to evaluate the efficacy of management. Most coral reefs are moderately to severely degraded by local human activities such as fishing and pollution as well as global change, hence it is difficult to separate local from global effects. To this end, we surveyed coral reefs on uninhabited atolls in the northern Line Islands to provide a baseline of reef community structure, and on increasingly populated atolls to document changes associated with human activities. We found that top predators and reef-building organisms dominated unpopulated Kingman and Palmyra, while small planktivorous fishes and fleshy algae dominated the populated atolls of Tabuaeran and Kiritimati. Sharks and other top predators overwhelmed the fish assemblages on Kingman and Palmyra so that the biomass pyramid was inverted (top-heavy). In contrast, the biomass pyramid at Tabuaeran and Kiritimati exhibited the typical bottom-heavy pattern. Reefs without people exhibited less coral disease and greater coral recruitment relative to more inhabited reefs. Thus, protection from overfishing and pollution appears to increase the resilience of reef ecosystems to the effects of global warming.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/454ebd36260bb31f3cde44b614076727fbc6d5de

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Citations in the corpus

Spatial patterns of the structure of reef fish assemblages at a pristine atoll in the central Pacific (2010, background): “The US Fish and Wildlife Service granted permission to operate in the Kingman Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.”
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Giant Clams (Bivalvia: Cardiidae: Tridacninae): A Comprehensive Update of Species and their Distribution, Current Threats and Conservation Status (2017, background): “Baselines and degradation of coral reefs in Northern Line Islands.”
Ecosystem consequences of fish parasites (2008, background): “…Fisheries Society of the British Isles, Journal of Fish Biology 2008, 73, 2083–2093 No claim to original US government works at Palmyra Atoll, there is no fishing pressure (there is no resident population), and large predators are strikingly abundant (Stevenson et al., 2007; Sandin et al., 2008).”
Species-specific consequences of ocean acidification for the calcareous tropical green algae Halimeda (2011, background): “The coral reefs of Palmyra are considered to be relatively healthy with reef building corals and CRAs making up greater than 50% of the benthic cover on the forereef slope (10 m) and shallow reef terrace (5 m depth) (54 and 78% cover, respectively; Sandin et al. 2008).”
Crustose coralline algae can suppress macroalgal growth and recruitment on Hawaiian coral reefs (2011, positive): “…important components of reef communities for several reasons: (1) they were abundant on reefs before coral–macroalgal ‘phase shifts’ occurred (Sandin et al. 2008, Vermeij et al. 2010); (2) they dominate space not occupied by corals on undisturbed reefs (Steneck 1997, Sandin et al. 2008);…”
Long-term movement patterns and trophic ecology of blacktip reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus) at Palmyra Atoll (2010, background): “…rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jembe.2010.02.009 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r.com/ locate / jmarsys that constitutes up to 60% of the total fish biomass (DeMartini et al., 2008; Sandin et al., 2008).”
An Overview of the Animal Forests of the World (2017, background): “The maintenance of the biodiversity is then important to preserve ecosystem stability and balance (Sandin et al. 2008).”
Coral reef benthic regimes exhibit non-linear threshold responses to natural physical drivers (2015, background): “In con- trast, coral reefs free from local human impacts tend to be characterized by calcifying (reef-building) benthic re gimes where hard corals and crustose coralline algae dominate (Sandin et al. 2008, Vroom et al. 2010, Williams et al. 2013).”