UC San Diego

Coral reefs hold immense ecologic, economic, and social value, yet these important ecosystems face an existential threat from global climate change. Coral reef conservation is thus an urgent international priority, yet it can be challenging to design and implement effective conservation measures due to the innate complexity of coral reef ecosystems. Coral reef “resilience” is shaped by numerous environmental, biotic, and anthropogenic processes that operate across a range of scales. A particular conservation strategy might be appropriate for one set of conditions but fail to adequately protect reef health in another. Robust coral reef monitoring data can help natural resource managers identify the key processes impacting a given reef and design appropriate management interventions. We demonstrate how new conservation technology, specifically large-area imagery (LAI), can enhance our ability to study ecosystem processes across multiple scales in space and time, identify drivers of ecosystem condition, and inform site-specific decision making. Here, we use Hawaiian coral reefs as a case study to investigate multiple reef processes using multi-scale LAI data, specifically 1) habitat structural complexity, 2) benthic community succession, and 3) coral bleaching, growth, and survivorship in response to thermal stress. We apply these findings to quantify “resilience” (specifically patterns of resistance and recovery) at multiple scales for forereefs in leeward Maui. We use this multi-scale data to critically evaluate the predictive accuracy of coral reef resilience assessments, a popular conservation triage and marine spatial planning tool. In doing so, we demonstrate the potential of LAI to inform conservation decision making, and we recommend steps that can be taken to make this conservation technology more accessible to practitioners.