Principles for estimating fish productivity on coral reefs
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Principles for estimating fish productivity on coral reefs Renato A. Morais1,2
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David R. Bellwood1,2
Received: 29 March 2020 / Accepted: 15 June 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Coral reefs provide major nutritional inputs to humans through fish production. Yet, our capacity to adequately assess fish productivity in these and other highdiversity aquatic systems is hampered by a lack of computationally accessible methods with realistic data requirements. Standing stock biomass is often assumed to reflect biomass productivity, yet theoretical and empirical evidence question this assumption. These methodological hurdles have stymied progress in managing this critical coral reef function, potentially jeopardising the future of many small-scale tropical fisheries struggling to respond to global changes. Here, we summarise the physiological and ecological processes that lead to the production of fish biomass. We outline principles and present a robust framework for quantifying fish productivity in high-diversity ecosystems that overcomes these shortcomings by integrating readily accessible individual-level data (e.g. from visual counts) with growth trajectories and predicted mortality rates. This framework provides fisheries-independent estimates of multispecies fish productivity without the need to specify often unknown detailed trophic relationships. We delineate five simple steps and provide a
Topic Editor Morgan S. Pratchett
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-020-01969-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users. & Renato A. Morais [email protected] 1
College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia
2
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia
critical user-friendly interface (an easy-to-use R package) to make the calculation of fish productivity a readily accessible tool for coral reef scientists and managers. Keywords Ecosystem function Coral reef functioning Somatic growth Mortality rates Rfishprod Reef fishes Reef fisheries
Introduction Overfishing and global warming are rapidly reshaping earth’s marine and freshwater ecosystems, changing species composition and altering fluxes of energy and matter (Norstro¨m et al. 2016). Some of these ecosystems are experiencing widespread structural and functional changes (Hughes et al. 2017; Bellwood et al. 2019), with new configurations that are now considered irreversible. Importantly, we are only starting to understand the functional implications of these new ecosystem configurations (Fig. 1a,b) (Bellwood et al. 2019; Brandl et al. 2019a). With the onset of the Anthropocene, management of natural resources requires new strategies to accurately measure and then prepare for the impacts of contemporary drivers of change on critical ecosystem services (Norstro¨m et al. 2016). Aquatic natural r
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