This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.
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Abstract
Sedimentation is a major coral reef stressor, with effects including suppressing algae consumption by herbivorous fish. This puts pressure on reef fish populations and the fisheries that harvest them. Deforestation causes much sedimentation on reefs, and is an ongoing concern in Pacific island states. Although ecosystem processes like deforestation and fish population dynamics are usually far from equilibrium, explicitly time-dependent analyses of reef fish vulnerability to deforestation are rare. Additionally, optimization methods for fisheries on heavily sedimented reefs are generally unexplored. Here, we construct a model coupling four reef fish functional groups with seabed dynamics and deforestation, fit using data for the Solomon Islands. We show that with predicted human population increases, highland deforestation could cause herbivorous and omnivorous fish abundances to halve within 15-30 years, but that piscivorous fish and top predators are resilient to lowland deforestation. We demonstrate that flexible fishing approaches could lead to high and temporally stable populations of herbivorous fish and top predators, offsetting sedimentation-related stress. We show that the combination of deforestation and increased fishing demand due to human population growth may cause medium-term local reef fish extirpation. Our results provide sustainability guidelines for reef fisheries, and demonstrate nonlinear interactions between overfishing and deforestation.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.32942/X2M909
Subjects
Dynamic Systems, Natural Resources and Conservation, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Keywords
coral reef fisheries, food web model, Solomon Islands, fishing quotas, soil erosion
Dates
Published: 2024-01-22 03:04
License
CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Language:
English
Data and Code Availability Statement:
All data used for model parametrization is taken from previous publications. The code for simulating the model is on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7036364).
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