ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Gravity of human impacts mediates coral reef conservation gains.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 275 citations in OpenAlex.
- Assessing responses of reef island seabirds to environmental and anthropogenic drivers.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Assessing and strengthening community-based coastal governance.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Marine protected areas marginally offset anthropogenic declines in tropical reef fish contributions to nature and people.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Habitat and local factors influence fish biomass recovery in marine protected areas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Conserving the beauty of the world's reef fish assemblages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Restoration cannot be scaled up globally to save reefs from loss and degradation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Functional diversity shapes the stability of reef fish biomass under global change.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Design and management considerations for the Kenya-Tanzania marine transboundary conservation area.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Review
- The Sharklogger Network-monitoring Cayman Islands shark populations through an innovative citizen science program.PloS one · 2025Article
- Using Community Composition and Successional Theory to Guide Site-Specific Coral Reef Management.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Human and conservation factors affect spatial variation of reef fish assemblages in Colombian Pacific reefs.PeerJ · 2025Article
- Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on coral reefs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global patterns and drivers of fish reproductive potential on coral reefs.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Directed conservation of the world's reef sharks and rays.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Environmental DNA recovers fish composition turnover of the coral reefs of West Indian Ocean islands.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Combining environmental DNA and visual surveys can inform conservation planning for coral reefs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Marine protected areas promote stability of reef fish communities under climate warming.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evidence for managing herbivores for reef resilience.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
37 authors at 20 institutions in 10 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Coral reefs provide ecosystem goods and services for millions of people in the tropics, but reef conditions are declining worldwide. Effective solutions to the crisis facing coral reefs depend in part on understanding the context under which different types of conservation benefits can be maximized. Our global analysis of nearly 1,800 tropical reefs reveals how the intensity of human impacts in the surrounding seascape, measured as a function of human population size and accessibility to reefs ("gravity"), diminishes the effectiveness of marine reserves at sustaining reef fish biomass and the presence of top predators, even where compliance with reserve rules is high. Critically, fish biomass in high-compliance marine reserves located where human impacts were intensive tended to be less than a quarter that of reserves where human impacts were low. Similarly, the probability of encountering top predators on reefs with high human impacts was close to zero, even in high-compliance marine reserves. However, we find that the relative difference between openly fished sites and reserves (what we refer to as conservation gains) are highest for fish biomass (excluding predators) where human impacts are moderate and for top predators where human impacts are low. Our results illustrate critical ecological trade-offs in meeting key conservation objectives: reserves placed where there are moderate-to-high human impacts can provide substantial conservation gains for fish biomass, yet they are unlikely to support key ecosystem functions like higher-order predation, which is more prevalent in reserve locations with low human impacts.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.