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Satellite image of Flinders Reef, with the approximate transect location and direction marked on the map with short solid transect lines accompanied by site names in white. The Marine National Park 'green' zone (500 m radius) where no fishing or anchoring is allowed is designated by the solid polygon. Dotted polygon (1000 m radius) represents the suggested extension of the green zone (see Discussion). The four Reef Check Australia long-term monitoring sites are Turtle Cleaning, Coral Garden, Plate and Alden Cave. Turtle Cleaning Station, Coral Gardens, Alden's Cave and Plateland in Reef Check Australia reports. The grey area indicates the predominantly exposed area of Flinders Reef, and the inset maps on the right show the location of Flinders Reef in Moreton Bay and in Australia. The prevailing wind direction for Flinders Reef is east-south-east. Source image: WorldView 2 image Digital Globe (https://www.digitalglobe.com/, verified 27 April 2020), 2 Â 2 m pixels.
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Subtropical reefs are important habitats for many marine species and for tourism and recreation. Yet, subtropical reefs are understudied, and detailed habitat maps are seldom available. Citizen science can help fill this gap, while fostering community engagement and education. In this study, 44 trained volunteers conducted an ecological assessment...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... Reef is located on a small sandstone platform (6.5 ha), three nautical miles north of Moreton Island in the northern part of Moreton Bay Marine Park, south-eastern Queensland, Australia (26858.715 0 S, 153829.150 0 E; Fig. 1). The location hosts a rich coral community with 125 documented species (Harrison et al. 1998;Harriott and Banks 2002;Wallace et al. 2009;Sommer et al. 2014). It is considered to be one of the most southern distribution ranges of many tropical coral and fish species, including Acropora spp. and Labridae (Dalton and Roff 2013;McPhee ...
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... ranges of many tropical coral and fish species, including Acropora spp. and Labridae (Dalton and Roff 2013;McPhee 2017;Sommer et al. 2017). Since 2009, the reef has been a designated protected green zone under Marine Park management, which prohibits harvesting, fishing and anchoring within a 500-m radius from the centre of the reef platform (Fig. 1). The conservation park zone has a 2-km radius from the centre of Flinders Reef and a total of eight public moorings are available for activities allowed within this zone. As such, Flinders Reef is afforded some protection from human influences because of zoning status, and its distance from the mainland, which limits both visitation ...
Context 3
... set up a representative monitoring and habitat-mapping framework around Flinders Reef, 10 survey sites were established at 5-10-m depth within the green-zone area (Fig. 1). The 10 sites were selected around the sandstone platform to capture representative areas with characteristic differences in exposure to wind speed and wave height, where prevailing wind and wave direction is east-south-east. The following four of the 10 sites are long-term Reef Check Australia monitoring sites: Alden's Cave, Coral ...
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... and spring surveys were assessed using a Student's t-test on the basis of the overall mean of measurements for the four survey types, i.e. benthos, reef impacts, invertebrates and fish. The assumptions of normality were met for these data. Because no significant differences were found, measurements were averaged between seasons (see table S2 and Fig. 1). At each site, impact, invertebrate and fish surveys were calculated per 100 m 2 and benthic surveys were calculated as percentage cover. Many of the reef-impact categories are coral specific; hence, areas with high coral cover may have a disproportionate number of impacts when compared with areas of low coral cover. To allow for ...
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... may prompt consideration for expansion of the green zone to a circular area of a 1000-m radius. Such an expansion would result in inclusion of all areas mapped with coral communities to a depth of 25 m, a two-fold increase in protected area of benthic categories that include corals, and a three-fold increase in protected area that include rocky substrate (Figs 1, 2, dotted polygon), which is required for coral settlement and post-settlement survival (Yadav et al. 2016). Furthermore, green zones have been shown to enhance recreational fishing opportunities outside of the protected area through exports of increased fish biomass and abundance (Emslie et al. 2015), benefiting both fishermen and the ecosystem. ...
Context 6
... Reef is located on a small sandstone platform (6.5 ha), three nautical miles north of Moreton Island in the northern part of Moreton Bay Marine Park, south-eastern Queensland, Australia (26858.715 0 S, 153829.150 0 E; Fig. 1). The location hosts a rich coral community with 125 documented species (Harrison et al. 1998;Harriott and Banks 2002;Wallace et al. 2009;Sommer et al. 2014). It is considered to be one of the most southern distribution ranges of many tropical coral and fish species, including Acropora spp. and Labridae (Dalton and Roff 2013;McPhee ...
Context 7
... ranges of many tropical coral and fish species, including Acropora spp. and Labridae (Dalton and Roff 2013;McPhee 2017;Sommer et al. 2017). Since 2009, the reef has been a designated protected green zone under Marine Park management, which prohibits harvesting, fishing and anchoring within a 500-m radius from the centre of the reef platform (Fig. 1). The conservation park zone has a 2-km radius from the centre of Flinders Reef and a total of eight public moorings are available for activities allowed within this zone. As such, Flinders Reef is afforded some protection from human influences because of zoning status, and its distance from the mainland, which limits both visitation ...
Context 8
... set up a representative monitoring and habitat-mapping framework around Flinders Reef, 10 survey sites were established at 5-10-m depth within the green-zone area (Fig. 1). The 10 sites were selected around the sandstone platform to capture representative areas with characteristic differences in exposure to wind speed and wave height, where prevailing wind and wave direction is east-south-east. The following four of the 10 sites are long-term Reef Check Australia monitoring sites: Alden's Cave, Coral ...
Context 9
... and spring surveys were assessed using a Student's t-test on the basis of the overall mean of measurements for the four survey types, i.e. benthos, reef impacts, invertebrates and fish. The assumptions of normality were met for these data. Because no significant differences were found, measurements were averaged between seasons (see table S2 and Fig. 1). At each site, impact, invertebrate and fish surveys were calculated per 100 m 2 and benthic surveys were calculated as percentage cover. Many of the reef-impact categories are coral specific; hence, areas with high coral cover may have a disproportionate number of impacts when compared with areas of low coral cover. To allow for ...
Context 10
... may prompt consideration for expansion of the green zone to a circular area of a 1000-m radius. Such an expansion would result in inclusion of all areas mapped with coral communities to a depth of 25 m, a two-fold increase in protected area of benthic categories that include corals, and a three-fold increase in protected area that include rocky substrate (Figs 1, 2, dotted polygon), which is required for coral settlement and post-settlement survival (Yadav et al. 2016). Furthermore, green zones have been shown to enhance recreational fishing opportunities outside of the protected area through exports of increased fish biomass and abundance (Emslie et al. 2015), benefiting both fishermen and the ecosystem. ...
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Citations
... Additionally, forecasting connectivity schemes (Calò et al. 2013, Andrello et al. 2014, and developing reliable grouper populations modelling (Heppell et al. 2006, Wielgus et al. 2007), would provide insightful information to inform the design of MPAs networks in a manner that can address identified groupers' management concerns in a scenario of global change (McLeod et al. 2009), as well as contribute to the development of effective fisheries management strategies. An essential link of scientific research is the use of TEK-LEK (Medeiros et al. 2018, Ribeiro et al. 2021) and citizen science (Freiwald et al. 2018, Fulton et al. 2018, Bonney et al. 2021, Grol et al. 2021 as complementary sources of data, which have to be urgently and massively incorporated into research funding programmes, also as a way to ensure the support and compliance of local communities to the incepted conservation measures (Bennett et al. 2019). ...
... Moreover, such observations allow to monitor migratory birds, e.g., [30][31][32][33][34]; rare and endangered species, e.g., [35][36][37][38]; expansion of pests, e.g., [20,39,40]; or alien and/or invasive species, e.g., [18,22,39,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] as well as colonization of new human-made habitats, e.g., [51]. In addition, numerous studies show that data collected by amateur scientists allow to describe new interactions between species, e.g., [17,52], to investigate animal phenology, e.g., [53], and behavior, e.g., [54], to find changes in species abundance and demography, e.g., [55][56][57], and other threats for local fauna and flora being important for nature conservation, e.g., [8,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. ...
The American red flat bark beetle, Cucujus clavipes, is a wide distributed saproxylic species divided into two subspecies: ssp. clavipes restricted to eastern regions of North America and ssp. puniceus occurring only in western regions of this continent. Unique morphological features, including body shape and body colouration make this species easy to recognize even for amateurs. Surprisingly, except some studies focused on physiological adaptations of the species, the ecology of C. clavipes was almost unstudied. Based on over 500 records collected by citizen scientists and deposited in the iNaturalist data base we studied phenological activity of adult beetles, habitat preferences and impact of future climate change for both subspecies separately. The results clearly show that spp. clavipes and ssp. puniceus can be characterized by differences in phenology and macrohabitat preferences, and their ranges do not overlap at any point. Spp. clavipes is found as more opportunistic taxon occurring in different forests as well as in urban and agricultural areas with tree vegetation always in elevations below 500 m, while elevational distribution of ssp. puniceus covers areas up to 2300 m and the beetle was observed mainly in forested areas. Moreover, we expect that the climate warming will have negative influence on both subspecies with the possible loss of proper niches at level even up to 47-70% of their actual ranges during next few decades. As the species is actually recognized as unthreatened and always co-occur with many other species we suggest, because of its expected future habitat loss, to pay more attention of conservationists for possible negative changes in saproxylic insects and/or forest fauna in North America. In addition, as our results clearly show that both subspecies of C. clavipes differ ecologically, what strongly supports earlier significant morphological and physiological differences noted between them, we suggest that their taxonomical status should be verified by molecular data, because very probably they represent separate species.
