In their blog post for EDFish, Ocean Tipping Points team members Rod Fujita and Kendra Karr explain how their research is helping to elucidate where tipping points in coral reef ecosystems occur and how maintaining adequate reef fish biomass could be a key to managing for resilient coral reef systems.
By: Rod Fujita & Kendra Karr
Fisheries management is principally focused on managing fishing pressure, with the goal of keeping individual fish stocks healthy enough to produce good yields. But fisheries also affect the basic processes that keep ocean ecosystems healthy. This is why it is important to understand how many fish need to be in the system to maintain the many important services that an ocean ecosystem can produce — including the maintenance of biodiversity, tourism value, and fisheries — and to manage fisheries so that fish populations remain at about that level...
- See full post at: http://blogs.edf.org/edfish/2013/12/04/coral-reef-thresholds-for-ecosystem-management/#sthash.VlfZSw2Q.dpuf