CNH-L: Interactive Dynamics of Reef Fisheries and Human Health

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems and provide food, jobs, and protection from storms for coastal communities. The foods derived from coral reefs play a critical role in supporting nutritional health in many countries. Under optimal conditions, an intact coral reef can provide an abundant supply of food resources to coastal communities. However, overfishing, pollution, environmental change, and economic globalization are currently transforming reefs and the surrounding communities, placing both the health of the reef and the health of people at risk. This research seeks to understand the interactions between coral reefs and human communities. The project seeks to identify effective reef management practices that lead to levels and types of seafood consumption that promote human nutrition. Undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and local inhabitants will be trained in methods of surveying reef health, human health, and fisheries management practices. Through this convergent research, the investigators will develop generalizable principles that can lead to harmonious management of the health of fisheries and seafood-dependent people. This award will identify the environmental and economic factors that lead to the decline in reef-based food systems. In addition to filling key gaps in our understanding of the human health impacts, this project will advance social-ecological trap theory by empirically testing the extent to which certain feedbacks produce trap dynamics and estimating critical drivers of transitions. To accomplish this, the investigators will dovetail their research efforts with a scheduled socio-economic survey. This project offers a unique quasi-experimental design to study roughly independent and isolated yet culturally similar sites, along a gradient of reef health, market access, and fisheries management strategies. Researchers will collect data on fisheries management approaches and the current status of reef fish and conduct clinical health surveys to determine levels of anemia, obesity, diabetes, and other nutritional disorders that can arise from lacking seafood in one's diet. This award will address pressing questions about the thresholds for reef transitions; the feedbacks between the diversity and abundance of reef-based fisheries; and fisheries activities, management, and consumption. Collectively, this project will illuminate the pathways by which healthy reefs translate into healthy people and the opportunities to maintain healthy and sustainable reef-based food systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.