Introducing Elinor for monitoring the governance and management of area-based conservation.

Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area-based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering and using data on governance and management to inform decision-making across spatial scales and through time. We explored current and past efforts to assess governance and management effectiveness and barriers actors face in using the resulting data and insights to inform conservation decision-making.

Papuan Bird's Head Seascape: emerging threats and challenges in the global center of marine biodiversity.

The Bird's Head Seascape located in eastern Indonesia is the global epicenter of tropical shallow water marine biodiversity with over 600 species of corals and 1,638 species of coral reef fishes. The Seascape also includes critical habitats for globally threatened marine species, including sea turtles and cetaceans. Since 2001, the region has undergone rapid development in fisheries, oil and gas extraction, mining and logging.

The likelihood of extinction of iconic and dominant herbivores and detritivores of coral reefs: the parrotfishes and surgeonfishes.

Parrotfishes and surgeonfishes perform important functional roles in the dynamics of coral reef systems. This is a consequence of their varied feeding behaviors ranging from targeted consumption of living plant material (primarily surgeonfishes) to feeding on detrital aggregates that are either scraped from the reef surface or excavated from the deeper reef substratum (primarily parrotfishes). Increased fishing pressure and widespread habitat destruction have led to population declines for several species of these two groups.