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Report by William Naviti and James Aston

The global decline of coral reefs had led to calls for strategies that reconcile biodiversity conservation and fisheries benefits. Still considerable gaps in our understanding of the spatial ecology of ecosystem services remain. We combined spatial information on larval dispersal networks and estimated of human pressure to test the importance of connectivity for ecosystem service provision. We found that reefs receiving larvae from highly connected dispersal corridors were associated with high fish species richness.

Coral Triangle documents

Reefs at Risk Revisited is a high-resolution update of the original global analysis, Reefs at Risk: A Map-Based Indicator of Threats to the World’s Coral Reefs. Reefs at Risk Revisited uses a global map of coral reefs at 500-m resolution, which is 64 times more detailed than the 4-km resolution map used in the 1998 analysis, and benefits from improvements in many global data sets used to evaluate threats to reefs (most threat data are at 1 km resolution, which is 16 times more detailed than those used in the 1998 analysis).

The coral reefs in PNG are mostly located to the north and east coast of the country and lie within the ‘coral
triangle’ that includes eastern Indonesia, the Philippines, eastern Malaysia, Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands.
The coral triangle is a global centre of marine biodiversity and has very high conservation value.

This report documents the status, economies and management of corals -

Effective conservation requires rigorous baselines of pristine conditions to assess the impacts of human activities and to valuate the efficacy of management. The study 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.