The influence of resilience-based management on coral reef monitoring: A systematic review

Abstract

With rapid changes taking place on coral reefs, managers and scientists are faced with prioritising interventions that might avoid undesirable losses in ecosystem health. The property of resilience captures how reefs react and respond to stressors and environmental changes. Therefore, in principle, management goals are more likely to be realised if resilience theory is used to inform decision making and help set realistic expectations for reef outcomes. Indeed, a new approach to reef management has been termed ‘resilience-based management’ (RBM). Yet, resilience concepts have often been criticised for being vague, difficult to operationalise, and beset by multiple definitions. Here, we evaluate how the advent of RBM has changed one aspect of reef management: assessment and monitoring. We compare the metrics used in conventional monitoring programs with those developed through resilience assessments and find that the latter have a stronger focus on ecological processes and exposure to environmental drivers. In contrast, monitoring tends to focus on metrics of reef state and has greater taxonomic resolution, which provides comprehensive information on the nature of changes but does not predict the future responses of reefs in part because it is difficult to extrapolate statistical trends of complex ecological systems. In addition, metrics measured by resilience studies are more diverse, owing in part to the reliance of state metrics as proxies of processes given the difficulty in quantifying key ecological processes directly. We conclude by describing practical ways of improving resilience assessments, and avenues for future research.