{"id":14235,"date":"2016-07-20T09:56:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-20T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=14235"},"modified":"2024-07-02T16:28:46","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:28:46","slug":"reefs-bruno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=14235","title":{"rendered":"Isolated coral reefs far from human activity are not healthier"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A colony of elk horn coral, Acropora palmata, which is listed as threatened under the U.S. endangered species act. This species once dominated Caribbean reefs but has been virtually wiped out by disease and climate change. (From Akumal, Mexico, in 2014. Photo by John Bruno)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the world\u2019s coral reefs, the picture keeps getting gloomier. Although it\u2019s widely assumed that both local and global factors are contributing to their decline, new research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that isolated reefs far from human activities are in fact not <\/em>healthier than those in more densely populated areas.<\/p>\n

The work, led by John Bruno<\/a>, a professor of marine biology in UNC\u2019s College of Arts and Sciences, marks the first global test of the hypothesis that isolated reefs are suffering from less damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe often mythologize isolated coral reefs as pristine and safe from harm,\u201d said Bruno. \u201cIn fact, coral loss on some of our isolated reefs is just as dramatic as coral decline on reefs adjacent to more densely populated islands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bruno and co-author Abel Valdivia (a former UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student, currently a research scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity in Oakland. Calif.), analyzed data from 1,708 reefs around the world from the Bahamas to Australia collected from 1996 to 2006. Reef isolation was calculated as the number of people living within 50 kilometers of the reefs.<\/p>\n

The research, reported online July 20 in the Nature journal Scientific Reports<\/em>, shows that local management efforts to mitigate impacts of things like fishing and tourism cannot alone restore coral reef populations, which provide a home for thousands of marine species and offer coastal buffering from storms.<\/p>\n