Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on coral reefs.

The amount of ocean protected from fishing and other human impacts has often been used as a metric of conservation progress. However, protection efforts have highly variable outcomes that depend on local conditions, which makes it difficult to quantify what coral reef protection efforts to date have actually achieved at a global scale. Here, we develop a predictive model of how local conditions influence conservation outcomes on ~2,600 coral reef sites across 44 ecoregions, which we used to quantify how much more fish biomass there is on coral reefs compared to a modeled scenario with no protection.

Stimulating the capacity to govern the commons.

The ability to strengthen governance institutions and fisheries restrictions and laws is needed to improve conservation and management of common-pool resources. We evaluated the potential for stimulating change with modest interventions by studying fishing village households before and after a 27-month intervention period in a high-priority coral reef conservation area. Interventions included training in catch monitoring, stock assessment, mapping fishing grounds, microcredit, gender inclusion, theatrical skills, fuel efficient stoves, and participation in the planning of a conservation proposal.

Testing for concordance between predicted species richness, past prioritization, and marine protected area designations in the western Indian Ocean.

Scientific advances in environmental data coverage and machine learning algorithms have improved the ability to make large-scale predictions where data are missing. These advances allowed us to develop a spatially resolved proxy for predicting numbers of tropical nearshore marine taxa. A diverse marine environmental spatial database was used to model numbers of taxa from ∼1000 field sites, and the predictions were applied to all 7039 6.

Tropical fishery nutrient production depends on biomass-based management.

The need to enhance nutrient production from tropical ecosystems to feed the poor could potentially create a new framework for fisheries science and management. Early recommendations have included targeting small fishes and increasing the species richness of fish catches, which could represent a departure from more traditional approaches such as biomass-based management. To test these recommendations, we compared the outcomes of biomass-based management with hypothesized factors influencing nutrient density in nearshore artisanal fish catches in the Western Indian Ocean.

Trophic distribution of nutrient production in coral reef fisheries.

Coral reef fisheries supply nutritious catch to tropical coastal communities, where the quality of reef seafood is determined by both the rate of biomass production and nutritional value of reef fishes. Yet our understanding of reef fisheries typically uses targets of total reef fish biomass rather than individual growth (i.e.

Effects of management objectives and rules on marine conservation outcomes.

Understanding the relative effectiveness and enabling conditions of different area-based management tools is essential for supporting efforts that achieve positive biodiversity outcomes as area-based conservation coverage increases to meet newly set international targets. We used data from a coastal social-ecological monitoring program in 6 Indo-Pacific countries to analyze whether social, ecological, and economic objectives and specific management rules (temporal closures, fishing gear-specific, species-specific restrictions) were associated with coral reef fish biomass above sustainable yield levels across different types of area-based management tools (i.e.

Usage and coordination of governance principles to address proximate and distal drivers of conflicts in fisheries commons.

Commons' problems and solutions have the elements of local, proximate, and large-scale distal processes. Solutions, therefore, require accessing, implementing, and coordinating information and actions at multiple scales. Restoring commons, such as fisheries, will require a better understanding of how stakeholders access and use information at various scales to resolve governance and restrictions problems.

Diversification of refugia types needed to secure the future of coral reefs subject to climate change.

Identifying locations of refugia from the thermal stresses of climate change for coral reefs and better managing them is one of the key recommendations for climate change adaptation. We review and summarize approximately 30 years of applied research focused on identifying climate refugia to prioritize the conservation actions for coral reefs under rapid climate change. We found that currently proposed climate refugia and the locations predicted to avoid future coral losses are highly reliant on  excess heat metrics, such as degree heating weeks.

Mid-Holocene expansion of the Indian Ocean warm pool documented in coral Sr/Ca records from Kenya.

Proxy reconstructions suggest that mid-Holocene East African temperatures were warmer than today between 8 and 5 ka BP, but climate models cannot replicate this warming. Precessional forcing caused a shift of maximum insolation from boreal spring to fall in the mid-Holocene, which may have favored intense warming at the start of the warm season. Here, we use three Porites corals from Kenya that represent time windows from 6.

Fish catch responses to Covid-19 disease curfews dependent on compliance, fisheries management, and environmental contexts.

The responses of small-scale coastal fisheries to pauses in effort and trade are an important test of natural resource management theories with implications for the many challenges of managing common-pool resources. Three Covid-19 curfews provided a natural experiment to evaluate fisheries responses adjacent a marine reserve and in a management system that restricted small-mesh drag nets. Daily catch weights in ten fish landings were compared before and after the curfew period to test the catch-only hypothesis that the curfew would reduce effort and increase catch per unit effort, per area yields, and incomes.

Neoadjuvant Therapy Induces a Potent Immune Response to Sarcoma, Dominated by Myeloid and B Cells.

Purpose: To characterize changes in the soft-tissue sarcoma (STS) tumor immune microenvironment induced by standard neoadjuvant therapy with the goal of informing neoadjuvant immunotherapy trial design.

Experimental Design: Paired pre- and postneoadjuvant therapy specimens were retrospectively identified for 32 patients with STSs and analyzed by three modalities: multiplexed IHC, NanoString, and RNA sequencing with ImmunoPrism analysis.

Results: All 32 patients, representing a variety of STS histologic subtypes, received neoadjuvant radiotherapy and 21 (66%) received chemotherapy prior to radiotherapy.

Reverse Translating Molecular Determinants of Anti-Programmed Death 1 Immunotherapy Response in Mouse Syngeneic Tumor Models.

Targeting the programmed death 1/programmed death ligand 1 (PD-1/PD-L1) pathway with immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of many cancers. Somatic tumor mutational burden (TMB) and T-cell-inflamed gene expression profile (GEP) are clinically validated pan-tumor genomic biomarkers that can predict responsiveness to anti-PD-1/PD-L1 monotherapy in many tumor types. We analyzed the association between these biomarkers and the efficacy of PD-1 inhibitor in 11 commonly used preclinical syngeneic tumor mouse models using murinized rat anti-mouse PD-1 DX400 antibody muDX400, a surrogate for pembrolizumab.

Transcriptomic Determinants of Response to Pembrolizumab Monotherapy across Solid Tumor Types.

Purpose: To explore relationships between biological gene expression signatures and pembrolizumab response.

Experimental Design: RNA-sequencing data on baseline tumor tissue from 1,188 patients across seven tumor types treated with pembrolizumab monotherapy in nine clinical trials were used. A total of 11 prespecified gene expression signatures [18-gene T-cell-inflamed gene expression profile (TcellinfGEP), angiogenesis, hypoxia, glycolysis, proliferation, MYC, RAS, granulocytic myeloid-derived suppressor cell (gMDSC), monocytic myeloid-derived suppressor cell (mMDSC), stroma/epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT)/TGFβ, and WNT] were evaluated for their relationship to objective response rate (per RECIST, version 1.

Decadal shifts in traits of reef fish communities in marine reserves.

Marine reserves are known to impact the biomass, biodiversity, and functions of coral reef fish communities, but the effect of protective management on fish traits is less explored. We used a time-series modelling approach to simultaneously evaluate the abundance, biomass, and traits of eight fish families over a chronosequence spanning 44 years of protection. We constructed a multivariate functional space based on six traits known to respond to management or disturbance and affect ecosystem processes: size, diet, position in the water column, gregariousness, reef association, and length at maturity.

The timing and causality of ecological shifts on Caribbean reefs.

Caribbean reefs have experienced unprecedented changes in the past four decades. Of great concern is the perceived widespread shift from coral to macroalgal dominance and the question of whether it represents a new, stable equilibrium for coral-reef communities. The primary causes of the shift-grazing pressure (top-down), nutrient loading (bottom-up) or direct coral mortality (side-in)-still remain somewhat controversial in the coral-reef literature.

Coral community life histories and population dynamics driven by seascape bathymetry and temperature variability.

Temperature variability, habitat, coral communities, and fishing intensity are important factors influencing coral responses to climate change. Consequently, chronic and acute sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and their interactions with habitat and fishing were studied along the East African coast (~400km) by evaluating changes over a ~25-year period in two major reef habitats-island and fringing reefs. These habitats had similar mean and standard deviation temperature measurements but differed in that islands had lower ocean heights and flatter and less right-skewed temperature distributions than fringing reefs.

Meeting fisheries, ecosystem function, and biodiversity goals in a human-dominated world.

The worldwide decline of coral reefs necessitates targeting management solutions that can sustain reefs and the livelihoods of the people who depend on them. However, little is known about the context in which different reef management tools can help to achieve multiple social and ecological goals. Because of nonlinearities in the likelihood of achieving combined fisheries, ecological function, and biodiversity goals along a gradient of human pressure, relatively small changes in the context in which management is implemented could have substantial impacts on whether these goals are likely to be met.

Effective fisheries management instrumental in improving fish stock status.

Marine fish stocks are an important part of the world food system and are particularly important for many of the poorest people of the world. Most existing analyses suggest overfishing is increasing, and there is widespread concern that fish stocks are decreasing throughout most of the world. We assembled trends in abundance and harvest rate of stocks that are scientifically assessed, constituting half of the reported global marine fish catch.

Social-environmental drivers inform strategic management of coral reefs in the Anthropocene.

Without drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate globalized stressors, tropical coral reefs are in jeopardy. Strategic conservation and management requires identification of the environmental and socioeconomic factors driving the persistence of scleractinian coral assemblages-the foundation species of coral reef ecosystems. Here, we compiled coral abundance data from 2,584 Indo-Pacific reefs to evaluate the influence of 21 climate, social and environmental drivers on the ecology of reef coral assemblages.

Social-ecological alignment and ecological conditions in coral reefs.

Complex social-ecological interactions underpin many environmental problems. To help capture this complexity, we advance an interdisciplinary network modeling framework to identify important relationships between people and nature that can influence environmental conditions. Drawing on comprehensive social and ecological data from five coral reef fishing communities in Kenya; including interviews with 648 fishers, underwater visual census data of reef ecosystem condition, and time-series landings data; we show that positive ecological conditions are associated with 'social-ecological network closure' - i.

Water quality mediates resilience on the Great Barrier Reef.

Threats from climate change and other human pressures have led to widespread concern for the future of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Resilience of GBR reefs will be determined by their ability to resist disturbances and to recover from coral loss, generating intense interest in management actions that can moderate these processes. Here we quantify the effect of environmental and human drivers on the resilience of southern and central GBR reefs over the past two decades.

Identifying species threatened with local extinction in tropical reef fisheries using historical reconstruction of species occurrence.

Identifying the species that are at risk of local extinction in highly diverse ecosystems is a big challenge for conservation science. Assessments of species status are costly and difficult to implement in developing countries with diverse ecosystems due to a lack of species-specific surveys, species-specific data, and other resources. Numerous techniques are devised to determine the threat status of species based on the availability of data and budgetary limits.

The future of resilience-based management in coral reef ecosystems.

Resilience underpins the sustainability of both ecological and social systems. Extensive loss of reef corals following recent mass bleaching events have challenged the notion that support of system resilience is a viable reef management strategy. While resilience-based management (RBM) cannot prevent the damaging effects of major disturbances, such as mass bleaching events, it can support natural processes that promote resistance and recovery.

Conservation needs exposed by variability in common-pool governance principles.

Common-pool governance principles are becoming increasingly important tools for natural resource management with communities and comanagement arrangements. Effectiveness of these principles depends on variability in agreements, trust, and adherence to institutional norms. We evaluated heterogeneity in governance principles by asking 449 people in 30 fishing communities in 4 East African countries to rate their effectiveness.