Turks and Caicos Islands 2006 coral reef assessment: Large-scale environmental and ecological interactions and their management implications

T.J Goreau,F Perez,T Fisher,A Lewin,K Lockhart,M Hibbert

doi:10.15517/rbt.v56i0.5576

Abstract

La salud de los arrecifes coralinos de las Islas Turcas y Caicos (uno de los mejores sistemas arrecifales en la región) es vital para su bienestar económico y ambiental. Los métodos tradicionales de evaluación proporcionan relativamente poca información porque cubren un área muy pequeña para caracterizar con precisión complejos sistemas arrecifales, no pueden captar integralmente pautas a gran escala y además la alta variabilidad espacial intrínseca de los arrecifes inhibe la capacidad de los datos obtenidos en pequeñas áreas para identificar cambios o causas. Las investigaciones espacialmente extensivas suministran más información, sobre áreas mayores y en menos tiempo que las intensivas, revelando gradientes a gran escala que los métodos intensivos son inherentemente incapaces de identificar y brindan un nuevo paradigma que pudiera usarse ampliamente para el manejo ambiental, con mayor efectividad económica. A principios de junio de 2006 se llevaron a cabo investigaciones extensivas, evaluándose 26 parámetros ecológicos y ambientales en 47 sitios arrecifales a lo largo de las Islas. Se puso especial énfasis en identificar las diferentes zonas de algas a lo largo de gradientes ambientales. Los datos obtenidos están siendo utilizados para desarrollar estrategias nacionales de manejo de la calidad de agua y de restauración de corales.

Highlights

Turks and Caicos Islands: The Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) lie at the extreme southeast end of the Bahama Islands chain, but form a separate country
This section is followed by an analysis of the results of the patterns that emerged from the data analysis, many of which were not previously noticed
Coral disease patterns: Many long known correlations between variables, such as those related to intensity of land development nearby, are shown in the network of significant associations revealed by this data

Summary

Introduction

Turks and Caicos Islands: The Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) lie at the extreme southeast end of the Bahama Islands chain, but form a separate country (online supplement). Intensive versus extensive assessment: Traditional methods of reef assessment, such as the 1999 AGRRA surveys, count corals (or fish) and estimate total algae abundance along short line transects or in small quadrat frames. We refer to these as “intensive” methods in this paper. High measurement variability and the extremely small areas measured intrinsically prevent seeing larger scale ecological gradients, yet these larger scales are usually the dominant feature of reefs ecosystems After such methods were first applied to reefs in Jamaica in the 1960s by T. This method is more consistent with mining data from natural history observations to generate testable hypotheses, than the conventional “hypothesis driven” science, which presumes the expected relationship that is being tested

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion