Future too warm for baby sharks
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au
Marine protected areas (MPA) play a central role in marine conservation. Conservation planners design MPA networks and guide implementation of conservation actions by identifying potential conservation areas. Criteria for regional networks are that they should be representative of biodiversity and promote its long-term persistence and the processes that sustain it. In order to ensure long-term persistence, planners need to consider the open nature of marine ecosystems and linkages between realms. MPAs are highly vulnerable to natural resource development and exploitation outside their boundaries, as well as to degradation from coastal development. Logging, agriculture, and urbanization are affecting marine coastal habitats and communities through altered fluxes of sediments, nutrients, and pollutants. These problems cannot be alleviated by MPAs alone and demand planning for integrated implementation of conservation actions in the land-sea continuum. While methodologies to incorporate land-sea connections in coastal planning are developing, most reserve selection methods have not embraced an integrated approach. Recent advances in theories and tools in conservation planning can contribute to overcome these limitations and to explicitly incorporate land-sea connections. However, additional scientific knowledge is needed to address cross-system threats and to manage the complexities of conservation across realms. My project will review theory and practice in land-sea conservation planning in order to develop an operational framework. I will use the Gulf of California as a case study to develop and test this framework and to identify gaps in research, planning, and implementation. I will explore methods to identify land areas important for marine conservation (i.e. potential sources of sediments, nutrients and pollutants) and how these can change in time, based on a coastal catchments model (CCM) and a land-use change model. A spatial comparison of downstream (CCM) and upstream (i.e. biodiversity, ecosystem services) land values, supported by multicriteria analyses, will address the potential trade-offs resulting from competing values and ongoing habitat loss. Finally, I will model the potential impact of land-based impacts, based on estimates of river plumes (dispersal model), and use these results and previous models to create an integrated land-sea plan.
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
A new study shows the coastal protection coral reefs currently provide will start eroding by the end of the century, as the world continues to warm and the oceans acidify. A team of researchers led
A team of scientists led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) won one of the nation’s top science awards at tonight’s ‘Oscars of Australian science’, the Eureka P
An analytical tool will be used to assess the climate risks facing historic World Heritage sites in Africa—the ruins of two great 13th century ports and the remains of a palace and iron-making indus
Abstract: It is a little over a decade since research commenced into the effects of anthropogenic ocean acidification on marine fishes. In that time, we have learned that projected end-of-century
Abstract: Increased uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has caused the world’s ocean to become more acidic. Different marine habitats are known to have varying ranges of CO2 across mul
Abstract: The Allen Coral Atlas (http://allencoralatlas.org) partnership uses high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning, and field data to map and monitor the world’s coral reefs at unp
Abstract: Climate change is causing the average surface temperature of the oceans to rise and increasing the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves. In addition, absorption of additional CO2
Abstract: Marine environments are a concealing medium, where observations of natural fish behavior are challenging. In particular, the geographic and depth distributions of migratory top predators ar
Abstract: Invasive species management can be the the subject of debate in many countries due to conflicting ecological, ethical, economic, and social reasons, especially when dealing with a species s
Abstract: Ocean acidification, the increase in seawater CO2 with all its associated consequences, is relatively well understood in open oceans. In shelf seas such as the Great Barrier Reef, processe
Abstract: The backdrop of legends and movies, the deep sea has always been unfathomable because we had no idea what existed there. Once thought to be barren of life, we now know this couldn’t be
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au