[Coral-List] reliable coral reef statistics

John McManus jmcmanus at rsmas.miami.edu
Sun Sep 15 14:07:10 EDT 2013


This is a good summary, and I hope everyone will read through it.

I just posted the following comment there: 

"Great article, especially regarding the 'thinning' of coral cover point.
Just a correction: the Reefs at Risk reports were indeed peer reviewed, and
extensively so. Recognizing the fact that existing, publicly available time
series on coral reefs have been extremely patchy and strongly biased towards
reefs that are convenient, popular and inexpensive to access, they used
modern GIS modelling procedures to extrapolate existing information on reef
threats. A much better approach would be to have monitoring sites
distributed in an unbiased manner around the world, as described by Jeremy
Jackson in his ICRS plenary last year. Several of us spent many years trying
to organize such an effort, but it has been impossible so far to find a
funding approach to support this. Good luck to the new effort, which will
hopefully spread outside the Caribbean. In the meantime, these meta-analyses
are a very helpful complement to the GIS-based analyses, and further
integration of these two approaches will improve the analyses.  

Note that the early version of ReefBase was aimed specifically at
meta-analyses. However, at the time, most scientists considered field data
to be "capital", for personal or institutional use only, even when funded by
tax dollars. Now, with the advent of ocean monitoring programs and a
crack-down by NSF concerning its data release policies, hopefully that will
change and more substantial field data will become widely available. "
-- 
John

John W. McManus, PhD.
Professor, Marine Biology and Fisheries
Director, National Center for Coral Reef Research (NCORE)
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS)
University of Miami. Phone: 305-421-4814
Website: http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/people/faculty-index/?p=john-mcmanus
NCORE Website: http://ncore.rsmas.miami.edu/

"If I cannot build it, I do not understand it." -- Richard Feynman, Nobel
Laureate
..

-----Original Message-----
From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
[mailto:coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov] On Behalf Of John Bruno
Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2013 10:01 AM
To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Cc: Isabelle Cote; Thomas Goreau; Aronson Richard B.
Subject: [Coral-List] reliable coral reef statistics

Dear Steve, 

I wrote this piece in response to your query about data on coral depletion.
I summarized papers on coral cover loss and included links to all the source
paper PDFs. Other changes (e.g., fish, algae, reef complexity) and
predictions of future state will be in another post:)

"What we know about coral loss"  http://theseamonster.net/?p=15140

Comments and criticisms welcome. But please post directly on the blog to
keep the conversation in one place. 

John F Bruno, PhD
Professor
Department of Biology
UNC Chapel Hill
www.johnfbruno.com (http://www.johnfbruno.com)


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