Applying systems thinking and synthesis approaches to understand climate and conservation impacts on coral reef social-ecological systems

Abstract

Tropical coastal marine ecosystems (TCMEs), including coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass beds, are rich biodiversity hotspots which provide many ecosystem services for local human populations. TCMEs face increasing threats from local drivers of overexploitation and development and global drivers of anthropogenic climate change. Global concern for the health of TCMEs has led to an increase in both marine conservation interventions and climate mechanism research on TCMEs. Local management and conservation initiatives are important for addressing climate change, and understanding community-level perspectives is increasingly seen as important for successful implementation of those initiatives. In this dissertation, I use guiding frameworks identifying both social and ecological impacts of conservation interventions on TCMEs and anthropogenic climate change on coral reef systems. I approach these tropical systems as social-ecological systems (SES), and thus use systems approaches to understand systems-level impacts. The collective aim of my dissertation chapters is to inform science and practice where social-ecological lenses of both research and perception focus on these systems, versus where there are gaps in both research and understanding.In Chapter 1, I apply a systematic mapping approach to describe the literature on social and ecological outcomes associated with conservation interventions in TCMEs and show the extent, occurrence, and characteristics of evidence related to conservation interventions and outcomes. I find research gaps on common interventions (e.g., enforcement & prosecution), important social outcomes (e.g., knowledge & behavior), habitats (e.g., mangroves), and geography (e.g., the Middle East). In Chapter 2, I focus on coral reef social-ecological systems and apply network approaches to scientific literature reviews to code qualitative connections from climate threats to subsequent outcomes as nodes in a social-ecological network (SEN). I find connections generally focused on certain climate threats (e.g., sea surface temperature) and the most-connected literature nodes related to coral reefs and reef fish while impacts to shellfish and human communities were less connected in these generalized reviews. In Chapter 3, I assess stakeholder perceptions of climate threats impacts in the Caribbean, utilizing the same qualitative coding as Chapter 2 to create both aggregate and country-level perception SENs. I find that coastal stakeholders exhibit climate threat perceptions in the form of complex SES. I also find that individual country networks showcase nuance in climate perceptions, while an aggregate Caribbean SEN can help distill common climate threat perception pathways throughout all country sites. This dissertation closes in a Conclusion section where I summarize key dissertation findings and suggest areas where further research could continue to build upon this dissertation.This dissertation contributes to the field by characterizing tropical social-ecological systems via impacts from both conservation and climate change. Conceptualizing these systems as social-ecological networks adds nuanced perspective to the pathways by which both scientific reviews and local perception describe coral reef SES