Thriving Oceans Research Hub, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia.
College of Arts, Society and Education, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Oct 15;121(42):e2308605121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2308605121. Epub 2024 Oct 7.
The amount of ocean protected from fishing and other human impacts has often been used as a metric of conservation progress. However, protection efforts have highly variable outcomes that depend on local conditions, which makes it difficult to quantify what coral reef protection efforts to date have actually achieved at a global scale. Here, we develop a predictive model of how local conditions influence conservation outcomes on ~2,600 coral reef sites across 44 ecoregions, which we used to quantify how much more fish biomass there is on coral reefs compared to a modeled scenario with no protection. Under the assumptions of our model, our study reveals that without existing protection efforts there would be ~10% less fish biomass on coral reefs. Thus, we estimate that coral reef protection efforts have led to approximately 1 in every 10 kg of existing fish biomass.
海洋保护区的面积通常被用作衡量保护进展的指标。然而，保护工作的结果差异很大，这取决于当地的条件，因此很难量化迄今为止的珊瑚礁保护工作在全球范围内实际取得了什么成果。在这里，我们开发了一个预测模型，用以说明当地条件如何影响 44 个生态区的约 2600 个珊瑚礁地点的保护结果，我们用这个模型来量化与没有保护的模拟情景相比，珊瑚礁上的鱼类生物量增加了多少。根据我们模型的假设，研究表明，如果没有现有的保护措施，珊瑚礁上的鱼类生物量将减少约 10%。因此，我们估计珊瑚礁保护工作使现有的鱼类生物量增加了约 1/10。
