With marine biodiversity declining globally at accelerating rates, maximising the effectiveness of conservation has become a key goal for local, national and international regulators. Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been widely advocated for conserving and managing marine biodiversity yet, despite extensive research, their benefits for conserving non-target species and wider ecosystem functions remain unclear.
Larval dispersal is the key process by which populations of most marine fishes and invertebrates are connected and replenished. Advances in larval tagging and genetics have enhanced our capacity to track larval dispersal, assess scales of population connectivity, and quantify larval exchange among no-take marine reserves and fished areas. Recent studies have found that reserves can be a significant source of recruits for populations up to 40 km away, but the scale and direction of larval connectivity across larger seascapes remain unknown.
The fourth edition of the Newsletter of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Oceania (2018). IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) is the world's premier network of protected area expertise. It is administered by IUCN's Global Programme on Protected Areas and has over 2,000 members, spanning 140 countries.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) is in a naturally ironpoor region in the equatorial central Pacific. The main introduction of iron to this environment is from maritime debris, especially shipwrecks and anchor gear, and is linked to proliferation of turf algae and benthic bacterial communities, and the formation of degraded ‘black reefs’...
An expedition in 2002 to the Phoenix Islands Protected Area in the Republic of Kiribati documented an extensive and delicate community of staghorn and tabular Acropora colonies...
Our rapidly warming climate is threatening coral reefs as thermal anomalies trigger mass coral bleaching events. Deep (or “mesophotic”) coral reefs are hypothesised to act as major ecological refuges from mass bleaching, but empirical assessments are limited. We evaluated the potential of mesophotic reefs within the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and adjacent Coral Sea to act as thermal refuges by characterising long-term temperature conditions and assessing impacts during the 2016 mass bleaching event.
This report of 220 pages written by nearly 90 authors clearly presents the summation of an enormous amount of data and information on 19 of the 23 nations and states of the Pacific and outlines both the problems and stresses on these thousands of reefs, and the potential that these reefs will prove to be the reservoir of coral reefs for the world in the immediate future with the largest threat being global climate change.
The third edition of the Newsletter of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Oceania (2018). IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) is the world's premier network of protected area expertise. It is administered by IUCN's Global Programme on Protected Areas and has over 2,000 members, spanning 140 countries.
This research focuses on coral reef health in the South Pacific region, an area of high global coral diversity. Coral reef health surrounding two study sites in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, has been assessed in areas that have not been previously surveyed. Each study site has distinct differences based upon marine management practices. Marine management practices are identified and described and some historical rea- sons as why they exist are discussed.