Identifying Gaps in the Performance of Coastal Ecosystem Management

Abstract

Coastal ecosystems are crucial to sustain productive and functioning seascapes because they provide numerous ecosystem services. However, they are under threat and overburdened by multiple anthropogenic land-based and marine-based threats. Managing these threats is challenging because governance of the activities from which threats derive is often segregated and atomistic. Therefore, it is important to assess how management performs across the seascape to ensure adequate protection for coastal ecosystems from multiple threats. Assessing management performance, defined as the ability to meet management objectives, can help managers identify under-performing sites that may need extra management attention (e.g., enforcement, capacity building, or monitoring). Further, it can infer the recovery potential of targeted species or habitats to inform on biologically realistic performance targets. We use the systematic conservation planning framework to explore targeted questions about conservation planning, to identify management gaps and inform on global and regional management decisions.This work begins by asking a series of questions about why management is failing to protect one of the most neglected coastal ecosystems, seagrass. The underlying reason is that seagrass ecosystems are not recognised in legislation or policy and therefore their status and trends are not evaluated against any performance targets. This work has formed part of a global movement to improve the management of seagrass ecosystems, together with authorities charged with global governance of the environment. I then consider how performance targets take into account the social and environmental drivers of fish biomass and assess how this shapes fish recovery. I use this information to inform on management decisions in two case-studies: the northern region of New South Wales, Australia, and in two regional Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in southern Raja Ampat, Indonesia. In the NSW case study, I identify coastal areas that are at greatest risk to cumulative threats and suggest how management performance could be improved to protect temperate reef fish. In the Indonesian case-study, I suggest that to effectively evaluate MPA performance, it is critical to link historical threats and environmental conditions with coral reef fish outcomes. I then return to seagrass ecosystems as a case study to refine performance targets for monitoring to enable better detection of ecosystem trends. This work, carried out in southern Moreton Bay, Queensland, indicated that metabolomics could allow ecosystem trends to be identified more consistently and with greater accuracy than current methods. In my final chapter, I discuss the implications of these findings and make recommendations for key areas of further research. Each chapter of this thesis, although broad in design, has the same application to inform managers to make better decisions to protect coastal ecosystems. All chapters have an applied outcome and have utilised collaborators to make the information accessible to conservation managers.