Peer-reviewed publications

Coral reef fisheries depend on reef fish biomass to support ecosystem functioning and sustainable fisheries. Here, we evaluated coral reefs across 4,000 km of the Indonesian archipelago to reveal a large gradient of biomass, from <100 kg/ha to >17,000 kg/ha. Trophic pyramids characterized by planktivore dominance emerged at high biomass, suggesting the importance of pelagic pathways for reef productivity. Total biomass and the biomass of most trophic groups were higher within gear restricted and no‐take management, but the greatest biomass was found on unmanaged remote reefs. Within marine protected areas (MPAs), 41.6% and 43.6% of gear restricted and no‐take zones, respectively, met a global biomass target of 500 kg/ha, compared with 71.8% of remote sites. To improve conservation outcomes for Indonesia's biodiverse and economically important coral reef fisheries, our results suggest to: (1) strengthen management within Indonesia's existing MPAs and (2) precautionarily manage remote reefs with high biomass.

The health of coastal human communities and marine ecosystems are at risk from a host of anthropogenic stressors, in particular, climate change. Because ecological health and human well-being are inextricably connected, effective and positive responses to current risks require multidisciplinary solutions. Yet, the complexity of coupled social–ecological systems has left many potential solutions unidentified or insufficiently explored. The urgent need to achieve positive social and ecological outcomes across local and global scales necessitates rapid and targeted multidisciplinary research to identify solutions that have the greatest chance of promoting benefits for both people and nature. To address these challenges, we conducted a forecasting exercise with a diverse, multidisciplinary team to identify priority research questions needed to promote sustainable and just marine social–ecological systems now and into the future, within the context of climate change and population growth. In contrast to the traditional reactive cycle of science and management, we aimed to generate questions that focus on what we need to know, before we need to know it. Participants were presented with the question, "If we were managing oceans in 2050 and looking back, what research, primary or synthetic, would wish we had invested in today?" We first identified major social and ecological events over the past 60 years that shaped current human relationships with coasts and oceans. We then used a modified Delphi approach to identify nine priority research areas and 46 questions focused on increasing sustainability and well-being in marine social–ecological systems. The research areas we identified include relationships between ecological and human health, access to resources, equity, governance, economics, resilience, and technology. Most questions require increased collaboration across traditionally distinct disciplines and sectors for successful study and implementation. By identifying these questions, we hope to facilitate the discourse, research, and policies needed to rapidly promote healthy marine ecosystems and the human communities that depend upon them.

Collisions between ships and whales raise environmental, safety, and economic concerns. The management of whale-ship collisions, however, lacks a holistic approach, unlike the management of other types of wildlife-vehicle collisions, which have been more standardized for several years now. In particular, safety and economic factors are routinely omitted in the assessment of proposed mitigation solutions to ship strikes, possibly leading to under-compliance and a lack of acceptance from the stakeholders. In this study, we estimate the probability of ship damage due to a whale-ship collision. While the probability of damage is low, the costs could be important, suggesting that property damages are significant enough to be taken into consideration when assessing solutions. Lessons learned from other types of wildlife-vehicle collisions suggest that the whale-ship collision should be managed as wildlife-aircraft collisions. For several years, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) manages collisions between aircrafts and wildlife at the international level. We advocate that its United Nations counterpart, namely the International Maritime Organization (IMO), get more involved in the whale-ship collision management. Further research is needed to more precisely quantify the costs incurred to ships from damages caused by whale-ship collisions.

Does oil palm boost agricultural growth and reduce rural poverty, or is it a threat to rural livelihoods and tropical forest landscapes? This paper introduces a Special Issue on this question, focusing on Latin America. It reviews available literature and data for countries where oil palm either covers large areas (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras) or has recently expanded (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru), and presents evidence from nine case studies (including Nicaragua). Combining political economy with a livelihood approach, this article discusses how dissimilar policies supporting oil palm combined with contrasting agrarian change dynamics, market structures, and institutional arrangements driving rural inclusion (and exclusion) in oil palm production have resulted in a variety of expansion trajectories (ranging from smallholder-to plantation-based, plus mixed forms in between) and outcomes across the region. Main findings show that rural livelihoods and landscapes are most threatened where industrial plantations predominate, particularly in weakly governed forest frontiers, while oil palm is beneficial where policies guarantee land access and support smallholders. However, policies that are beneficial to smallholders do not preclude conflicts between oil palm smallholders (often migrant settlers) and forest-dependent (indigenous and Afro-descendant) communities opposing this industry.

Palm oil makes a significant contribution to the economies of Indonesia and Malaysia through private corporations, state-owned companies and smallholders, with the two countries supplying 85% of the global palm oil. Indonesia has 14 million hectares (ha) of oil palm; its palm oil exports were valued at USD 23 billion in 2017 and USD 21 billion in 2018. Both domestic and international communities, particularly the European Union (EU), have raised concerns about its sustainability and impact on forest conservation. For example, the European Parliament in 2017 issued a resolution to restrict the ability of EU countries to count palm oil-based biodiesel imports toward their renewable 2030 energy targets. This paper describes palm oil value chains in Indonesia at the national level, using value chain analysis and system dynamics modeling. The model is used to understand how the moratorium, peatland conservation, agrarian reform, and the EU biodiesel ban affect plantation expansion and production, employment, CO2 emissions, smallholder incomes, the private sector, and government. The model provides scenarios to make Indonesian palm oil more sustainable through intensification, no-deforestation, and no-peat strategies, as well as through land swapping. There are trade-offs between economic development and environmental conservation, but win-win solutions are available. Scenarios that build synergies between Indonesian palm oil development and forest conservation can help guide the new frontiers of oil palm development in Asia, South America, and Africa.

The paper assesses the effects of public innovation initiated by demands from communities in the northern Bolivian Amazon to revise forest regulations and policies. Bolivia enacted wide-reaching land and forest reforms in the mid-1990s, but these reforms were insufficient to tackle competing claims on forests and exclusion of local forest users from benefiting from timber production. Pressures by forest communities resulted in significant adjustments in regulations and policies, and the main driver was social pressure from communities as well as their representatives. The adjustments have allowed communal local practices, which were previously illegal, to become legal. They have allowed communities access to timber markets, improve incomes, and enhanced compliance with timber regulations.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) special report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) makes clear that most scenarios (90%) that hold warming to 1.5°C by 2100 include an overshoot, or a period in which the temperature increase exceeds 1.5°C before declining to the end-of-century 1.5°C goal (IPCC 2018). An overshoot is also possible for 2°C scenarios, given the lack of ambition in existing mitigation commitments. Current conservation policy and planning does not adequately account for the high likelihood of a temperature overshoot in a 1.5°C scenario, but the impacts of an overshoot on conservation may be large. Efforts to avoid an overshoot must be increased through more ambitious mitigation commitments and a greater focus on peak warming rather than end-of-century outcomes. Simultaneously, conservation planning should account for such impacts by anticipating more dynamic systems that carry greater uncertainties and potentially irreversible changes that may persist even as temperatures peak and decline.

The HydroATLAS database provides a standardized compendium of descriptive hydro-environmental information for all watersheds and rivers of the world at high spatial resolution. Version 1.0 of HydroATLAS offers data for 56 variables, partitioned into 281 individual attributes and organized in six categories: hydrology; physiography; climate; land cover & use; soils & geology; and anthropogenic influences. HydroATLAS derives the hydro-environmental characteristics by aggregating and reformatting original data from well-established global digital maps, and by accumulating them along the drainage network from headwaters to ocean outlets. The attributes are linked to hierarchically nested sub-basins at multiple scales, as well as to individual river reaches, both extracted from the global HydroSHEDS database at 15 arc-second (˜500 m) resolution. The sub-basin and river reach information is offered in two companion datasets: BasinATLAS and RiverATLAS. The standardized format of HydroATLAS ensures easy applicability while the inherent topological information supports basic network functionality such as identifying up- and downstream connections. HydroATLAS is fully compatible with other products of the overarching HydroSHEDS project enabling versatile hydro-ecological assessments for a broad user community.

Forests provide vital ecosystem services crucial to human well-being and sustainable development, and have an important role to play in achieving the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Little attention, however, has yet focused on how efforts to achieve the SDGs will impact forests and forest-related livelihoods, and how these impacts may, in turn, enhance or undermine the contributions of forests to climate and development. This book discusses the conditions that influence how SDGs are implemented and prioritised, and provides a systematic, multidisciplinary global assessment of interlinkages among the SDGs and their targets, increasing understanding of potential synergies and unavoidable trade-offs between goals. Ideal for academic researchers, students and decision-makers interested in sustainable development in the context of forests, this book will provide invaluable knowledge for efforts undertaken to reach the SDGs. This title is available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

Boreal forests are globally extensive and store large amounts of carbon, but recent climate change has led to drier conditions and increasing fire activity. The objective of this study is to quantify trends in fire size and frequency using data spanning multiple scales in space and time. We use multi-temporal Landsat image compositing on Google Earth Engine and validate results with reference fire maps from the Canadian Park Service. We also interpret general fire trends through the concept of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC). Our study site is Wood Buffalo National Park, which is a fire hot spot in Canada due to frequent lightning ignitions. The relativize differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) was the most accurate Landsat-based burn severity metric we evaluated (52.2% producer's accuracy, 87.6% user's accuracy). The Landsat-based burn severity maps provided a better fit for a linear relationship on the log-log scale of fire size and frequency than a manually drawn fire map. Landsat-based fire trends since 1990 conformed to a power-law distribution with a slope of 1.9, which is related to fractal dimensions of the satellite-based fire perimeter shapes. The unburned and low-severity patches within the burn severity mosaic influenced the power-law slope and associated fractal dimensionality. This study demonstrates a multi-scale and multi-dataset technique to quantify general fire trends and changing fire cycles in remote locations and establishes a baseline database for assessing future fire activity. Testing criticality by power laws helps to quantify emergent trends of contemporary fire regimes, which could inform the strategic application of prescribed fire and other management activities. Natural resource managers can utilize information from this study to understand local ecosystem adaptability to large fire events and ecosystem stability in the context of recent increasing fire activity.