Resilience of the Richest Reefs: a social-ecological-systems approach to sustaining coral reefs under increasing tourism
Project Description
My vision is to realize the development of adaptive marine conservation management in order to increase the resilience of coral reefs ecosystems under different scenarios of tourism development. I am taking a social-ecological-systems (SES) approach that explicitly links the resilience of ecosystems to governance structures, economies and society. Resilience refers to the capacity of the ecosystem to respond to environmental changes without losing the functions. Studying some of the few remaining global pristine reefs, located in Bird’s Head Seascape (BHS), West Papua Indonesia, I aim to produce a dynamic model that provides more tools for application than the broad conceptual level of current SES studies. I wish to define local conservation efforts that can help in enhancing the resilience of coral reefs. The output of this project will be a review article, workshop, definition of research lines for a new chair and a project proposal on this topic.