Potential impacts of climate change on agriculture and fisheries production in 72 tropical coastal communities.

Climate change is expected to profoundly affect key food production sectors, including fisheries and agriculture. However, the potential impacts of climate change on these sectors are rarely considered jointly, especially below national scales, which can mask substantial variability in how communities will be affected. Here, we combine socioeconomic surveys of 3,008 households and intersectoral multi-model simulation outputs to conduct a sub-national analysis of the potential impacts of climate change on fisheries and agriculture in 72 coastal communities across five Indo-Pacific countries (Indonesia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, and Tanzania).

Cumulative impact assessments highlight the benefits of integrating land-based management with marine spatial planning.

Cumulative impact assessments can inform ecosystem-based management by mapping human pressures and assessing their intensity on ecosystem components. However, its use to inform local management is scarce, largely due to the need for fine-grained spatial data representing ecosystem threats that can assess impacts at a local scale. Here, we applied the cumulative impact assessment framework to Moorea's coral reef, French Polynesia to inform the ongoing revision of the island-wide marine spatial management plan.

Landscape-scale patterns of nutrient enrichment in a coral reef ecosystem: implications for coral to algae phase shifts.

Nutrient pollution is altering coastal ecosystems worldwide. On coral reefs, excess nutrients can favor the production of algae at the expense of reef-building corals, yet the role of nutrients in driving community changes such as shifts from coral to macroalgae is not well understood. Here we investigate the potential role of anthropogenic nutrient loading in driving recent coral-to-macroalgae phase shifts on reefs in the lagoons surrounding the Pacific island of Moorea, French Polynesia.

Convergence of stakeholders' environmental threat perceptions following mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.

Managing human use of ecosystems in an era of rapid environmental change requires an understanding of diverse stakeholders' behaviors and perceptions to enable effective prioritization of actions to mitigate multiple threats. Specifically, research examining how threat perceptions are shared or diverge among stakeholder groups and how these can evolve through time is increasingly important. We investigated environmental threat perceptions related to Australia's Great Barrier Reef and explored their associations before and after consecutive years of mass coral bleaching.

Beauty and the reef: Evaluating the use of non-expert ratings for monitoring aesthetic values of coral reefs.

Aesthetic values are a key driver of tourist and recreational visitation to natural areas and are listed among the selection criteria for World Heritage properties. However, assessment and monitoring of aesthetic values in natural areas, and coral reefs in particular, have proven to be challenging. In our study we explored the value and limitations of a rapid assessment approach involving non-expert ratings of aesthetic beauty as a potential tool for long-term monitoring of aesthetic values in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, Australia.