Coral Reefs: A Reef Resilience Toolkit Module

Management Essentials

Marine resource management is complex and ultimately dependent on the resource users’ willingness to support management efforts and abide by protective regulations. A reef manager’s challenge is deciding which strategies to employ for a particular situation. Below are a listing of management fundamentals and specific actions to consider. Most of these highlight different ways to reduce stress and minimize damage to coral reef communities. This section is by no means a comprehensive resource on management strategies and should be considered an overview. For more detailed examples and guidelines refer to the resources at the bottom this page.

• Effective management of MPAs should include the maintenance of healthy coral communities as a primary objective.
• Reducing stresses that may affect coral community health (e.g., over-fishing, pollution, agricultural and urban waste, silt, and sewage, etc.) will provide communities a greater chance to survive bleaching stress or other major disturbance.
• Monitoring MPAs against baseline data and compared to control reefs outside MPAs is the best means of determining the effectiveness of management strategies.

Defining sustainable levels of fishing use and extraction provides reef communities a greater chance to survive bleaching stress or other disturbances. Photo © Eric Verheij

Specific actions to consider:

• Limiting, as necessary, particular extractive uses on coral reefs, like coral mining, or in linked areas that influence the reef ecosystem, e.g., preventing beachfront developments that would cause runoff of sediments, freshwater, or pollutants
• Protecting particular vital parts of coral reefs, e.g., bleaching resistant coral communities and critical habitats, such as spawning aggregation or nursery sites
• Restoring historic conditions, e.g., closing resilient areas to enable their recovery following bleaching events, or prohibiting damaging or polluting activities there
• Enhancing certain economically important activities, such as fisheries replenishment, or designating areas exclusively for tourism
• Defining sustainable levels of resource use and appropriate management structures, and implementing activities to monitor and control
• Obtaining, transferring, and sharing information, e.g., through research, learning networks, education, and interpretive programs

Other Direct Actions to Enhance Survival

Little can be done to control large-scale stresses at the source, at least in meaningful timeframes, but several direct actions can be taken to help reefs survive catastrophic bleaching events:

1. Protect multiple samples of a full range of reef types, representing the likely complement of biodiversity, to spread among them the risk of any one being completely lost as a consequence of such a bleaching event.
2. Identify and fully protect coral communities that are at low risk of succumbing to any such event, to enable them to seed susceptible areas, and so aid in their recovery.
3. Implement a management effectiveness evaluation system for the MPA, which allows for improvements in reef management, to maintain them as healthy as possible, and so better able to survive or recover rapidly from a bleaching event.
4. Manage susceptible sites to facilitate recovery. Methods could include removing crown-of-thorns starfishes and other coral predators, restricting or reducing fishing of herbivores, preventing destructive fishing practices, controlling tourism impacts, and improving water quality. A temporary strategy could include closure of reef fisheries on and around bleaching reefs.
5. Facilitate and foster scientific studies and research at the sites. Collaborative partnerships with local universities and research scientists can advance institutional credibility and political support to address mass coral bleaching.

Over the long term, managers should work toward nesting MPAs into broader management frameworks, such as vast multiple-use reserves, integrated coastal management regimes, or both, to enable effective control of threats originating upstream and maintain high water quality.

Resources

For more ideas on effective management strategies, review management strategies from other well established protected areas. Protected areas that have information available on the web include:

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park

Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary

Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary

No-Take Marine Reserves of New Zealand

The Science of Marine Reserves