Abstract

Current fisheries management assumes that with enough data populations can be precisely monitored and regulated. However, coral reef ecosystems (CREs) are complex, nonlinear socio-economic systems that easily overwhelm capacities for data collection and analysis. A more effective approach may be to manage for resilience, which ecologically means taking care of the system’s productive capacity. Protecting essential habitats and habitat linkages, trophic pathways and population structures then become the key ecological goals of fisheries management. The main threats to the local management of CREs are overfishing, land-based sources of pollution (LBSP) and lack of enforcement. Studies now strongly suggest that overfishing has a strong impact on benthic ecosystem health, most likely through the disruption of trophic structures. While it is unclear how much fishing effort must be reduced below MSY to protect CREs, it is clear that this reduction is significant. Thus, management need not wait for theory to reduce fishing effort and restore lost species and ecological function. Turbidity and eutrophication are the principal LBSP affecting CRE health and productive capacity. Efforts to deal with these go beyond conventional mechanisms of fisheries management and must instead interact with those mechanisms overseeing coastal development and land-use. Effective enforcement is the weak link in current management regimes, yet it is the primary mechanism for re-enforcing the covenant that should exist between stakehold-ers and managers. Habitat management is explicitly spatial. Marine reserves enhance system resiliency in multiple ways, both biologically and socially, and should be an integral component to CRE management.

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