Managers and
Practitioners: This toolkit provides you
with the latest tools, strategies, and protocols to address
coral bleaching and conservation of reef fish spawning aggregations.
You are invited to field-test and refine the methods in this
draft. In two years, a revised toolkit will be produced based
on your recommendations.
This R2—Reef
Resilience—toolkit is designed primarily for use by Marine
Protected Area (MPA) managers, trainers, and policymakers.
Entrusted with protecting coral reefs, they face significant
challenges because these ecosystems are highly vulnerable
to the demographic, economic, and environmental changes expected
during the next century.
R2
builds upon the principle that effective management is fundamental
to ensure reef survival. Comprised of two extensive topic
streams—Coral Bleaching and Reef Fish Spawning Aggregations—the
toolkit will help practitioners begin to build resilience
into their coral reef conservation programs so that these
valuable natural systems can survive the anticipated rapid
changes and provide for escalating human needs.
This Coral Bleaching Stream examines the definition,
causes, and consequences of coral bleaching and recognizes
that mass bleaching does not affect all corals equally on
any reef system.
Building on this, the toolkit provides information
and approaches to assist MPA managers examine factors that
may help coral communities either to resist or recover quickly
from bleaching events. It also helps them identify the locations
of resistant communities. These communities provide vital
refugia that are essential to the recovery and survival of
areas prone to degradation from multiple causes, including
mass bleaching. Protection of these refugia is a second underlying
principle of the toolkit.
The later sections of this toolkit, while constrained
by the current state of knowledge on the subject, propose
specific actions that MPA managers can take to diminish the
impacts of mass bleaching at different scales, from national
to local.
As our knowledge of the issues surrounding
coral bleaching and spawning aggregations improves, and our
understanding of better ways to deal with them becomes apparent,
new iterations of this toolkit may be anticipated.
The second stream of the R2
toolkit focuses on reef fish spawning aggregations as another
important source of seed for replenishment of degraded reefs.
Companion volume on MPA design and management:
http://www.iucn.org/themes/marine/pdf/mpaguid2.pdf
|
Using
the Toolkit: Coral Bleaching Stream
