FINAL PAPER/ESSAY

QUESTION/TOPIC: Recent monitoring studies have documented a dramatic decline in coral cover on many of the world's coral reefs. Most projections describe continued decline unless some sort of intervention is set in place. Fixing the problem involves three stages: 1) identifying what is wrong, 2) figuring out what we can and should fix, and 3) deciding the best ways to affect these changes. Discuss strategies that would be the most effective in reducing or reversing recent coral-reef loss. . Also, compare methods based on protecting species versus habitat. Finally, consider why one method (or a combination of methods) might be more or less effective than another. Make sure to consider scientific, economic and cultural factors in your discussion. For more detail, see below.

Please avoid discussing large-scale issues that most conservationists would recognize. I do NOT want a broad discussion of our need to conserve, shifts to alternative fuels, greater efficiency, lower population, environmental justice, slowing global warming, curbing foot odor... you get the idea. I want to see a discussion that considers how various strategies that have been proposed might be more or less effective given what we have discussed in class and what you find in the literature.

Paper length: 2-4 single spaced pages

Due date: See e-syllabus

Details: For your final essay, I want you to think about the nature of the problem and what we can and should do. How do we figure out the problems - what actually IS wrong? How do we decide which ones to fix? What strategies will be more or less effective on local versus regional and global scales? How have our perspectives changed in t he past decades? The past couple of years with increased degradation? Obviously, local soultions will be faster in the short run, but regional and global solutiuons will be needed to bring the situation under control. When you are considering larger-scale issues, feel free to spend a little time discussing creation of public will and how do deal with politics. However, this essay is supposed to be more about what we need to do and less how to sell it. So, as a general rule of thimb, feel free to discuss such related things to provide context, but I want the focus to be on "what" and "how". And, most important, I am as interested in the support for your opinions as I am in your opinions themselves (the latter will get you only half credit at best). Likewise, feeel free to spend some brief introductory time laying out the details of reef decline (you can save time by citing papers and just listing the problems)., but that's not the focus of this paper. There will probably be times when you need to describe a particular problem to set the stage, but remember that I already know the recent history of reef decline. So, your job is to strike a good balance between making sure you tie solutions and strategies to problems and having a paper that just rehashes all that is wrong.

Citations: For this paper, you cannot cite lecture notes or Powerpoints. You will need at least three citations from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and web citations cannot exceed the number from the peer-reviewed journals and books. For citation style, look at a copy of the journal Coral Reefs in the Science library.

Hints: Here are some existing strategies for protection. Feel free to follow up on them.

What we have in place are the concepts of 1) Coastal Zone Management (CZM), 2) Marine Protected Areas (MPA's) and 3) No Take Areas (NTA's). The Coastal Zone Management principle involves the requirement for a permit to build anything in the coastal zone. The decision to allow an activity is often made by a citizen board and is based on information provided by consultants, the developer, interested citizens and citizen groups plus government agencies tasked with overseeing activities in a particular area (for example, the US Coast Guard in navigable waters, the Environmental Protection Agency, etc.). Inherent in this approach is weighing economic pro's against environmental and/or social con's and coming up with a development plan which pumps the most cash into the local economy while doing the least amount of damage in the process.

MPA's are areas where regulations limit the sorts of activities that migh occur in a given area. Many national parks have similar structure on land. The idea is that activities are set up to be "consistent with" uniques cultural and natural resources located at the site. Some development can be allowed in an MPA (for example, piers). Perhaps most related to reef issues is fishing wjich can occur in an MPA but with restrictions that are presumably set at levels to create some degree of sustainability and minimal damage to the resource. As a starting point, you might visit the website: "http://mpa.gov/%00/" or try the" noaa.gov" site.

NTA's are even more strict in that they generally forbid the removal of anything from the designated area. This might involve permanent bans on fishing, coral extraction, etc. or may be part of a seasonally based set of regulations (e.g., a ban on fishing a particulat species during the spawning season). For a discussion of the viability of the No Take concept, do a search using "no take areas".

Within these general categories, there seem to be two over-arching strategies for marine conservation: saving habitat and preserving species (i.e., species diversity). Habitat preservation has been the underlying strategy in creating US National Parks. The recent literature is increasingly focusing on preserving species - either diversity of "keystone species" whose loss might disproportionately impact an ecosystem. The Hughes et al (2002) paper on eres discusses some interesting relationships between "biodiversity hotspots" and the sources of the species found in those hotspots. You might consider how this could relate to choosing what areas to save and what to save within those areas. Also think about larval dispersal and how the location of a reef might affect your decision of which reef to protect and which one not to. Do we save the pristene reefs/species or the ones closest to total loss? Do we save the "unique" ones or the "average" ones? How big do these protected areas need to be? What about interconnectedness? Feel free to consider other options that you find during your research, but make sure to stay within the boundaries of the central question - how are we going to figure out what's broken and what to fix.

Take-Home Message: In a nutshell, your essay should show some critical thought toward these and other similar questions. Here is where you may offer an opinion as long as it is backed up with either some solid logic or reliable data from the papers you cite.

REMEMBER THE HONOR CODE

A few papers that discuss general methods of protection or information that might be useful to you in thinking about the topic:

Hughes et al (2002; 2003)

Pandolfi et al (2003) and the response letter by Aronson et al (2003)

Gardner et al (2003) and the response letter by Buddemeier and Wade (2003)

Pandolfi et al (2005) - this will have some good references that you can track backward