Abstract

Shallow tropical marine habitats are being degraded at an alarming rate and new science-based approaehes are needed to reverse this trend in order to ensure their long-term conservation. Landscape ecology principles, though rarely tested in marine systems, have proven extremely useful in addressing "real-world" management issues in terrestrial systems. In fact, the successful design and management of many terrestrial reserves is largely dependent on insights gained from the application of landscape-level analyses. Tropical coral reef ecosystems, which exist as acomplex mosaic of interacting habitats, e.g., fringing reefs, surrounding seagrass patches and mangrove stands, may be well suited for study using a landscape ecology approaeh. We explored the utility of two terrestrially proven landscape metrics; ameasure of adjacent habitat diversity and measures of the areal coverage of critical adjacent habitats, to predict specific characteristics of reef fish assemblage structure. Adjacent habitat diversity was not a good predict of of total fish abundance or of species richness. However, the areal coverage of specific habitat types, seagrass in particular, was positively related to the abundance of several groups of commonly exploited fishes. Preliminary results suggest that this approach mighl be used to facilitate the design of marine protected areas,and thus will be of interest to a broad group of marine ecologists and resource managers.

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