A protocol for the intercomparison of marine fishery and ecosystem models: Fish-MIP v1.0

Tittensor, Derek P. and Eddy, Tyler and Lotze, Heike K. and Galbraith, Eric D. and Cheung, William and Barange, Manuel and Blanchard, Julia L. and Bopp, Laurent and Bryndum-Buchholz, Andrea and Büchner, Matthias and Bulman, Catherine and Carozza, David A. and Christensen, Villy and Coll, Marta and Dunne, John P. and Fernandes, Jose A. and Fulton, Elizabeth A. and Hobday, Alistair J. and Huber, Veronika and Jennings, Simon and Jones, Miranda and Lehodey, Patrick and Link, Jason S. and Mackinson,, Steve and Maury, Olivier and Niiranen, Susa and Oliveros-Ramos, Ricardo and Roy, Tilla and Schewe, Jacob and Shin, Yunne-Jai and Silva, Tiago and Stock, Charles A. and Steenbeek, Jeroen and Underwood, Philip J. and Volkholz, Jan and Watson, James A. and Walker, Nicola D. (2018) A protocol for the intercomparison of marine fishery and ecosystem models: Fish-MIP v1.0. Geoscientific Model Development, 11 (4). ISSN 1991-9603

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Abstract

Coral reefs are important habitats that represent global marine biodiversity hotspots and provide important benefits to people in many tropical regions. However, coral reefs are becoming increasingly threatened by climate change, overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution. Historical baselines of coral cover are important to understand how much coral cover has been lost, e.g., to avoid the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. There are few quantitative observations of coral reef cover prior to the industrial revolution, and therefore baselines of coral reef cover are difficult to estimate. Here, we use expert and ocean-user opinion surveys to estimate baselines of global coral reef cover. The overall mean estimated baseline coral cover was 59% (±19% standard deviation), compared to an average of 58% (±18% standard deviation) estimated by professional scientists. We did not find evidence of the shifting baseline syndrome, whereby respondents who first observed coral reefs more recently report lower estimates of baseline coral cover. These estimates of historical coral reef baseline cover are important for scientists, policy makers, and managers to understand the extent to which coral reefs have become depleted and to set appropriate recovery targets.

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