A
great problem for conserving marine ecosystems is that we rarely have a
good data on what things were like before human impacts started. In my last post,
I wrote about a study that showed that coral cover had declined on the
Great Barrier Reef by 50.7% since 1985. At the start of the study coral
cover was at 28%, but pristine coral reefs can have over 70% coral cover. This suggests that impacts on the Great Barrier Reef predate the
time monitoring started by many years.
A coral outcrop on the Great Barrier Reef (photo Wikipedia) |
They found that there was a pronounced transition in the coral species on the islands reefs between 1920 and 1955. The transition strongly correlated with a 5 to 10 fold increase in the amount of sediment found in the cores beginning in 1870, but showing several large peaks between the 1920s and 1970s. White settlement and land clearing of the area began in about 1870, the same time that high sediment loads were found in the cores. Prior to that, there was remarkable stability in the coral communities and the amount of sediment reaching the reef.
The new study highlights that reefs in 1985 that were thought to be relatively pristine probably had not been for 50 or 60 years. Therefore attempts to conserve reefs as they were in 1985 is inadequate because these reefs are likely to be already severely impacted by human activities. If we a serious about returning coral reefs to a pristine state, we should be restoring them to what they were like prior to white settlement, not what they were like now after a century of mistreatment.
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