Reef Resilience Review

Rapid Response Plan: How Important is it?

What’s New in the Reef Resilience Toolkit?

Spotlight on Aldabra Atoll, Seychelles

Recent Publications and Other Resources

To Join the network or submit updates, contact:
Stephanie Wear,
Director of Coral Reef Conservation
The Nature Conservancy, Global Marine Initiative
resilience@tnc.org

For more information about The Nature Conservancy's Global Marine Initiative, visit: www.nature.org/marine

This newsletter is brought to you through the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

May 2010 Newsletter
Distributed by the Global Marine Initiative

Rapid Response Plan: How Important is it?

The severity and frequency of local and global scale threats are causing mass bleaching events and serious declines in coral reef ecosystems worldwide.
© Bruce Carlson

Over the past six months, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Florida Keys to the Indo-Pacific coral reef, MPA managers have held their collective breath as vessel groundings, extreme cold snaps, and coral bleaching have affected coral reefs within protected areas. In disasters and bleaching situations, what can coral reef managers do?

Managers should prepare for such events by developing response plans ahead of time. The response plans can be applied both to disasters (like ship groundings) and bleaching situations, and include: setting ecosystem monitoring protocols; coordinating monitoring teams among multiple agencies; planning how to communicate about the event; and discussing how to implement management interventions.

In January 2010, this process played out when colder-than-usual (45°F) temperatures in South Florida waters threatened coral reefs with bleaching. This led The Nature Conservancy to mobilize a Disturbance Response Monitoring (DRM) program that had been put in place with partners in the FRRP (Florida Reef Resilience Program). The primary task of the South Florida DRM program is to conduct dive surveys over an eight-week period, monitoring impacts of an event. Even though the surveys have typically focused on warm water coral bleaching, they were also designed for application to other disturbance situations such as cold water disturbance. The ability of the FRRP to respond quickly with a well-trained monitoring team underscores the importance of a coral bleaching response plan.

Meanwhile, in the virtual world – at www.conservationtraining.org – twenty-seven coral reef managers and scientists from throughout the Caribbean are enrolled in an online course from March through May 2010. Every day they share their hopes, lessons learned and challenges they face in managing coral reefs with one another as they draft bleaching response plans for their respective geographies.

This is particularly important given what we expect to see in the Caribbean this summer. If the bleaching events being reported in Southeast Asia and the Western Indian Ocean are any indication (and they are!), Caribbean coral reef managers should be preparing to respond to predicted bleaching events in their locales. There are many ways to prepare, both in the way you plan to communicate with key audiences – to how you coordinate monitoring teams – to management action taken to protect highly sensitive habitats. It is never too early to start thinking about this.

For more information on developing your own bleaching response plans, click here.

What’s New in the Reef Resilience Toolkit?

Ocean Acidification is now among the many topics included in the Reef Resilience Toolkit. In this new section, you will find a discussion of Ocean Chemistry Essentials that includes an excellent video demonstration by Jane Lubchenco, Administrator of NOAA. Also included in this section is information on the impacts of ocean acidification and management strategies to prioritize. In addition to this new topic, we have also updated several of our case studies and added four new case studies from Raja Ampat, Mozambique, Wakatobi, and Sumatra. If you are interested in contributing a case study, please contact us at resilience@tnc.org!

Spotlight on Aldabra Atoll, Seychelles

Aldabra Atoll, a large raised atoll in the Western Indian Ocean, has been described as one of the wonders of the world as its isolation in a remote area of the Indian Ocean, combined with an inhospitable terrestrial environment, has preserved it in a relatively natural state. Although increasing levels of human stresses are contributing to the decline of the world’s coral reefs, Aldabra has thus far escaped the worst of these direct stresses, and provides an ideal natural laboratory for studying tropical marine ecosystems and related environments.

Aldabra Atoll was severely affected by the 1998 coral bleaching event, experiencing coral mortality of approximately 66% at 10 m depth, and 38% at 20 m depth. In addition to these natural disturbances and global climate change, the Aldabra area is also subjected to low-level human threats, including illegal fishing, poaching, and pollution.

The Aldabra Marine Program began its first resilience study in 1998 with the assistance of the IUCN and CORDIO. Surveys were used for monitoring purposes, and developed to understand coral reefs and other components of the protected area. The IUCN-CORDIO resilience assessments followed in 2008. Because this area is essentially pristine, barely touched by local human impacts but affected by climate change induced coral bleaching, it can serve as a reference site for other resilience case studies.