ReviewUsing very high resolution remote sensing for the management of coral reef fisheries: Review and perspectives
Introduction
Fisheries are an important source of food and livelihood worldwide (FAO, 2009) but they increasingly appear under threat of collapse (Worm et al., 2006). Overexploitation of many stocks, both for commercial and subsistence purposes, have largely depleted the populations of species of interest (Grainger and Garcia, 1996, Mullon et al., 2005). Fisheries have been widely studied for many decades but failure or non-application of management plans, resource crash, fishing down marine food webs and overexploitation did occur (Botsford et al., 1997, Pauly et al., 2002). In a global context of increasing population and protein-demand, there is an urgent need to promote sustainable management solutions that could mitigate fishery collapse more successfully. This includes Ecosystem Based Fishery Management (EBFM) and Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF) (Garcia et al., 2003, Hall and Mainprize, 2004, Pikitch et al., 2004). After a slow start in the years 1970s, the creation of networks of no-take marine reserves and protected areas (MPAs) became common practice as part of such frameworks (Roberts, 1995). MPA networks are increasingly designed to ensure that all habitats and functional processes are included to represent and protect ecosystems services and functions, including fishery stocks integrity (Bohnsack, 1998). EBM frameworks emphasize the links between fishery stock sustainability and habitat quality (Pikitch et al., 2004). As such; management actions must assess and conserve habitats with their physical and biological connections, and, in a fishery context, their valuable resource stocks.
Habitat is a key level of biological descriptions, and can be a convenient criterion for management decisions. Indeed, among the different levels of biological descriptions (from genes to ecosystems) on which reef management decisions focus, the habitat-level is the only one that can be synoptically observed and mapped with current remote sensing technology (Andréfouët et al., 2004). Remote sensing (RS) technology is an emerging tool which should contribute to help coral reef fisheries management, especially when management use habitat-level guidelines and recommendations (UNEP/CBD/COP/8/31, 2006). In favorable shallow depth and water clarity conditions, remote sensing may provide information on the reef itself (direct reef sensing, sensu Andrefouet and Riegl, 2004, Dalleau et al., 2010, Wabnitz et al., 2010), such as benthic cover, habitat locations, habitat diversity and patchiness, geomorphologic structures, bathymetry, and water circulation. Satellites also sense the reef environment (indirect reef sensing), including the ocean (temperature, wave height, sea level, turbidity, chlorophyll and colored dissolved organic matter concentrations), the atmosphere (wind, aerosols, rain, solar insolation, cloud cover) and the nearby lands (vegetation cover, watershed structure, urban growth) (Andréfouët, in press).
The objective of this paper is to draw an updated picture of the current and potential applications of direct remote sensing for coral reef fishery science and management, particularly in the light of the capacities and limits of the very high spatial resolution multispectral data available since the early years 2000. These sensors provide commercial panchromatic and multispectral images anywhere on the planet. As a consequence of there enhanced spatial resolution, they also provide in many cases a better thematic resolution, i.e. the capacity to map accurately a greater number of habitats. In a fishery context, this means that they should be useful in mapping more precisely the specific shallow habitats of selected fishery resource of interest, and thus should open new perspectives for fishery science and management.
Section snippets
Methods
In this study, the term “very high resolution” refers to sensors and techniques at spatial resolution (i.e. size on the ground of a pixel of a digital image) between 0.6 and 10 m. This is in contrast with “medium resolution” sensors at few hundreds of meters (e.g. MODIS sensor on board Terra and Aqua satellites, or MERIS sensor on Envisat), and “high resolution” sensors at few tens of meters (e.g. sensors on board the SPOT 1–4, Landsat 4–7 satellites). Thus, our focus is to review the use of the
Results and discussion
The compilation of the various studies suggests a number of lessons that we discuss below by order of decreasing importance. Obviously, this is subjective ranking. The discussion could be organized differently, for instance to emphasize differences in finfish fisheries vs invertebrates fisheries, or local-scale fishery management vs large-scale management, or simple use of VHRM vs sophisticated use. We preferred to discuss around more general noteworthy conclusions relevant for managers, and
Conclusion
Management of coral reef resources is a challenging task because of the spatial and ecological complexity of this ecosystem and the common lack of local accurate relevant information and maps. The key remote sensing layer for reef fishery application is an adequate habitat map, as an indirect link to resource maps, and as a source of information for EBM. The previous sections highlighted their use to:
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visualize fishery data on a georeferenced background,
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elaborate sampling design for fishery and
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the various fishery scientists and managers who suggested this review. Michel Kulbicki, Marc Léopold, Laurent Vigliola and Nicolas Guillemot helped with their suggestions and references.
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2021, Marine Pollution BulletinCitation Excerpt :Coral studies using remote sensing could be direct in which data are related to the reef itself (Wabnitz et al., 2010), or indirect in which data represent the environmental conditions of the reef. Direct measurements include the location of reefs, patchiness, cover, and diversity of the habitat (Hamel and Andréfouët, 2010). Conversely, indirect measurements refer to temperature, turbidity, chlorophyll concentration, and organic matter concentration of the oceans, and also wind, rain, and cloud cover in the atmosphere (Hamel and Andréfouët, 2010).