Mishal Gudka

CORDIO East Africa · Coral Reefs

Countries have committed to conserving and restoring ecosystems after signing the Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) will serve as a headline indicator to track countries' progress toward achieving this goal. Using Kenyan coral reefs, we demonstrate how nations implementing the GBF can use st...

Management of Marine Protected Areas can be supported by a detailed understanding of ecosystem state. We assessed coral reefs within Pemba Channel Conservation Area in 2019 and evaluated changes over the previous decade. In 2019, hard coral cover ranged from 3.5 % to 58.4 % across sites, while coral recruitment was exceptionally high in places (14...

Protected and conserved areas (PCAs) are key ecosystem management tools for conserving biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services and social cobenefits. As countries adopt a 30% target for protection of land and sea under the Global Biodiversity Framework of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, a critical question emerging is,...

The persistence of diverse yet threatened ecosystems like coral reefs will require urgent action underpinned by effective assessments of resilience. Resilience potential assessments are commonly used to identify coral reefs likely to be more resilient to disturbances, based on indicators of state and function. Assessments are intended to support de...

Countries have committed to conserving and restoring ecosystems after signing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) will serve as a headline indicator to track progress of countries towards achieving this goal, and to guide action across the GBF’s targets. Using Kenyan coral reefs, we demons...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set the agenda for global aspirations and action to reverse biodiversity loss. The GBF includes an explicit goal for maintaining and restoring biodiversity, encompassing ecosystems, species and genetic diversity (goal A), targets for ecosystem prot...

Data on coral reef health prior to large-scale disturbances are unavailable in most parts of the world including the Western Indian Ocean (WIO). Robust coral reef health baselines could improve the understanding of changes occurring to reefs in the 21st century and prevent the “shifting baseline” phenomenon, enabling researchers and managers to eva...

Comprehensive and timely data-sharing is essential for effective ocean governance. This institutional analysis investigates pervasive data-sharing barriers in Kenya and Tanzania, using a collective action perspective. Existing data-sharing rules and regulations are examined in respect to boundaries, contextuality and incentive structures, complianc...

Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs) are key ecosystem management tools for conserving biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services and social co-benefits. As countries converge on a 30% target for protection of land and sea under the post-2020 framework of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, a critical question emerging is, “w...

Ocean warming is increasing the incidence, scale, and severity of global-scale coral bleaching and mortality, culminating in the third global coral bleaching event that occurred during record marine heatwaves of 2014-2017. While local effects of these events have been widely reported, the global implications remain unknown. Analysis of 15,066 reef...

Ecosystems worldwide are under increasing threat. We applied a standardized method for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems, to coral reefs in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO), covering 11,919 km² of reef (~5% of the global total). Our approach combined indicators o...

Programs and initiatives aiming to protect biodiversity and ecosystems have increased over the last decades in response to their decline. Most of these are based on monitoring data to quantitatively describe trends in biodiversity and ecosystems. The estimation of such trends, at large scales, requires the integration of numerous data from multiple...

The Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region comprises almost 6% (about 15,180 km2) of the total global area of coral reefs, and the region is a globally important hotspot for coral reef biodiversity. The WIO includes sovereign states along the eastern and southern African mainland (Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa), island states (Mauri...

There is widespread consensus among climate scientists today that global climate change is real and has anthropogenic roots. Marine species, for example, are exposed to a large array of abiotic stressors, such as warming and ocean acidification, that are linked directly to anthropogenic climate change. The general view on whether natural population...

A full-text view-only version of the paper is available here https://rdcu.be/bQUYS. Climate change, coupled with an El Niño, caused a devastating bleaching event in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) in 1998. Similar extreme conditions at the end of 2015 meant that there was a very high risk of widespread bleaching in the WIO at the start of 2016. In a...

This erratum has been initiated as authors first and last names appeared inverse in the original article and should be correctly read as.

Coral reefs are exceptionally biodiverse and human dependence on their ecosystem services is high. Reefs experience significant direct and indirect anthropogenic pressures, and provide a sensitive indicator of coastal ocean health, climate change, and ocean acidification, with associated implications for society. Monitoring coral reef status and tr...

Most species-climate models relate range margins to long-term mean climate but lack mechanistic understanding of the ecological or demographic processes underlying the climate response. We examined the case of a climatically limited edge-of-range population of a medium-sized grassland bird, for which climate responses may involve a behavioural trad...

Biological baseline survey of marine invasive species in the Lamu Archipelago conducted to develop species reference catalogues for inference in future invasive species monitoring surveys due to expected increase in maritime traffic due to the LAPSSET Port development.

The third global coral bleaching event started in the North Pacific in the summer of 2014, and continued for a record 3 years, only dissipating in 2017. It affected the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) between January and May 2016, and was the strongest bleaching event to occur in the region since 1998. The main objective of this report is to provide up...

The Western Indian Ocean contains 16% of the world’s coral reefs, and the region is now thought to host the second peak of coral reef biodiversity globally. The coral reef ecosystems underpin the economies of the countries in the region, particularly fisheries and tourism sectors, and provide livelihood opportunities and income for local communiti...