Project: Adaptive Capacity, Resilience, and Coral Reef State Shifts in Social-ecological Systems

Description from NSF award abstract:
This project will assess resilience in a coral reef social-ecological system. Over the last several decades, reefs around the Pacific island of Mo'orea, French Polynesia, have consistently reassembled to coral dominance after being impacted by major perturbations. Resilience to disturbance is a key component of coastal sustainability, as it maintains the reefs in a state capable of providing critical ecosystem services. The resilience of reefs in Mo'orea is particularly striking, given that coral reefs in many regions have experienced abrupt and potentially irreversible shifts from a coral dominated state, with complex structure and a rich fish community, to a macroalgae dominated state with fewer fish. This project will contribute to more sustainable management of coral reefs by identifying pathways that confer resilience, highlighting emerging vulnerabilities, and suggesting policy initiatives in areas such as integrated coastal zone management and sustainable development planning. An integrative social and natural science approach will be employed that addresses place-based questions about resilience, sustainability and adaptive capacity of coastal systems. A framework will be developed for addressing more complex questions about the Moorea social-ecological system, and this will provide a model for the integration of ecology and social science in other coastal systems. Research results will be disseminated broadly through stakeholder workshops, and graduate students will be engaged in all aspects of the work.

While the dynamics of state shifts are fundamental to understanding the resilience and long-term sustainability of coral reef social-ecological systems, the interplay between anthropogenic and ecological feedbacks is poorly understood in these systems. Systems with high population densities, widespread coastal development and intense resource exploitation typically show declines in the critical adaptive capacities that underpin resilience to local environmental variability. However, Moorea has maintained its resilience despite rapid development. This project will explore how the complex feedbacks in the Mo'orea coral reef social-ecological system maintain its capacity to withstand large-scale ecological disturbances. The study will involve interdisciplinary collaboration between social and natural scientists. Anthropological fieldwork focusing on the human dimensions of coral reef use, traditional governance, and indigenous ecological knowledge, will document how local communities perceive, respond to, and manage changes in ecosystem state. Ecological models will describe the dynamics of coral, algal and fish communities, including the feedbacks that make these communities susceptible to abrupt shifts in ecosystem state. These components will be integrated in a systems modeling framework that includes feedbacks both within and between the human and natural communities, quantitatively modeling how humans change their behavior as a function of ecosystem state and how the ecosystem is affected in turn by human activities. A key objective is to bridge the gap between data collected by social scientists and the dynamic ecosystem models developed by ecologists, as this is crucial to understanding the resilience and long-term sustainability of coastal social-ecological systems worldwide.

This project is supported under NSF's Coastal SEES (Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability) program.