The health of several coral reefs around the world has improved over the past few years, but overfishing still poses a major threat to reefs, according to a recently released study by the Reef Check program at UCLA.
Reef Check, a non-profit organization started in 1996 by UCLA visiting professor Greg Hodgson, at the Institute of the Environment at UCLA, is run by volunteer scientists who train and lead teams of volunteers in surveys of coral reefs.
Among the many findings released in its study, Reef Check found that marine-protected areas in developing countries showed signs of an increased number of fish in coral reefs from previous years the study was done.
But the study also found that the global mean of hard coral cover was a mere 32 percent, with only 34 reefs showing more than 70 percent hard coral cover and none higher than 85 percent. The results also indicate that coral reefs are negatively impacted by global warming.
The results were gathered by more than 5,000 volunteers who took part in monitoring some 1,500 reefs in more than half of all coral reef countries. In order to ensure that the data gathered could be standardized, Hodgson developed a protocol designed specifically for volunteers.
All volunteers must undergo a training program designed by Reef Check. On a reef dive, all dive teams must be led by a marine scientist who oversees collection of the data. Hodgson also has quality assurance checks for the data, and rejects data that doesn’t meet Reef Check’s standards.
“By limiting the IDs to ecologically and economically valuable species, we reduce chances of error,” Hodgson said. “We’re asking them to identify 20 key ecological indicators of coral reef health.”
Hodgson, who runs the program from his office in Hershey Hall, originally started the Reef Check program to develop a better understanding of the health of coral reefs around the world.
Coral reefs are considered the rainforests of the sea. They also provide food for 100 million coastal people, protect coastlines and are a source of new medicines.
“We had indications that there were problems on the reefs,” Hodgson said. “Everywhere we looked, coral reefs were in bad shape, so we said there was a coral reef crisis in coral reef health.”
From the data, Hodgson concluded that the biggest problem coral reefs face today isn’t pollution or sedimentation, as scientists previously thought. Instead, it’s overfishing.
“Overfishing is destabilizing reefs because predators have been fished out, and they’re down to herbivores, and the whole system has destabilized,” he said. “(It’s) an under-recognized problem, but if you look at a map, more reefs are in developing countries where people depend on them for food, not near cities where pollution is a problem.”
Reef Check has partnerships with volunteers, government agencies and businesses in developed and developing countries all over the world.
Two such volunteers are Mike and Nora Ross, who work with Reef Check through their dive shop on Cebu, an island in the Philippines. Their dive shop offers discounted dive course and Reef Check training to select locals to get them directly involved in surveys and conservation efforts.
“The only way (to raise awareness) is to give local communities the tools to go out and do it themselves,” Hodgson said. “Our main purpose is to try and direct the funds to help train local people to give them a feeling of stewardship over the reefs so they’ll manage them better in the long-term.”
As a result, the island of Cebu, whose reefs had previously declined as a result of dynamite and cyanide fishing, now benefits from a thriving fish population and the tourism dollars the reefs generate.
“You have to give people a personal link to their environment – to have an economic and public health interest it (the coral reefs),” said Lena Maun, program manager for Reef Check and a graduate student of environmental health sciences in the Public Health Department at UCLA. “That’s what Reef Check really supports – the idea that it’s your reef.”
Maun, who has led a training dive of 10 volunteers to the U.S. Virgin Islands, believes the program has been successful in attracting people from all backgrounds.
“The volunteers ranged from 17-65 years old, while they didn’t know much about their environment, they were all there to learn more and they were all surprised by how much they could learn from being in the water for 10 days,” Maun said.
Future plans to expand Reef Check involve setting up an interactive Web site where dive teams can input and access data for each reef remotely. Hodgson also has plans in the immediate future to set up California Reef Check, noting that overfishing has led to 19 species of fish being banned in California.
For now, Hodgson will bring the Reef Check study with him to the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. Among the 60,000 people in attendance will be presidents, government ministers and other influential leaders from countries around the world.
“Our goal is to raise public awareness and try to get the governments to collaborate with us to implement these very simple solutions which are incentive-based, giving them an economic alternative to just destroying a reef,” Hodgson said. “They ultimately will have to set up legislation and at least partial funding to make sure everything goes through.”
On the Web: www.reefcheck.org.