Mapping the Socio-Economic and Ecological Resilience of Japanese Coral Reefscapes across a Decade

Antoine Collin,Lawrence Bernardo,Kazuo Nadaoka

doi:10.3390/ijgi4020900

Abstract

Shallow coral reefs threatened by climate change must be spatio-temporally analyzed in terms of their protection of coastal human populations. This study combines Japanese spatio-temporal gradients of population/asset and coral buffering exposure to stress-inducing and stress-mitigating factors so that the socio-economic and ecological (SEE) resilience tied to coral reefscapes can be regionally mapped (1200 km) at a fine resolution (1 arcsec) over a decade (11 years). Fuzzy logic was employed to associated environmental factors based on the related population/asset/coral buffering responses, as found in the literature. Once the factors were weighted according to their resilience contributions, temporally static patterns were evident: (1) a negative correlation occurs between coral buffering resilience and latitude; (2) the least resilient islands are low-lying, deprived of wide reef barriers, and located on the eastern and southern boundaries of the Nansei archipelago; (3) the southwestern-most, middle and northeastern-most islands have the same SEE resilience; and (4) Sekisei Lagoon islands have a very high coral buffering resilience. To overcome uncertainty, future studies should focus on the socio-ecological adaptive capacity, fine-scale ecological processes (such as coral and fish functional groups) and the prediction of the flood risks in the coming decades.

Highlights

Coastal coral reefs, which provide valuable marine-based ecological services to mankind, have become a prominent scientific and socio-economic issue because they are rapidly declining worldwide.These tropical and sub-tropical ecosystems protect coastal populations from high-energy oceanic events, supply seafood, and stimulate recreational activities [1]
Coral reef services have been valued at approximately US$ 6000 ha−1·year−1 [2], 19% of these services have been recently lost [3] as a consequence of anthropogenic stressors, including overfishing, eutrophication, sedimentation, disease and climate change [4,5]
Resilience was first examined at exogenous socio-economic and ecological organizational scales and was secondly examined at the integrated SEE scale, which focused on the coastal protection service provided to humans by coral reefs

Summary

Introduction

Coastal coral reefs, which provide valuable marine-based ecological services to mankind, have become a prominent scientific and socio-economic issue because they are rapidly declining worldwide. These tropical and sub-tropical ecosystems protect coastal populations from high-energy oceanic events, supply seafood, and stimulate recreational activities [1]. The latest literature performs empirical assessments of reef resilience by appropriately measuring the factors that confer and undermine the resilience of coral reefs [15] These authors provided a foundational framework based on the in situ identification of primary benthic covers and morphology, fish functional groups, water column and light properties, and anthropogenic drivers. Techniques suitable for capturing spatial resilience (i.e., spatial heterogeneity and connectivity) in a continuous way are advocated to link spatial patterns of coral reef regimes [10]

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