Philippa Kaur

Ian Bateman and Andrew Balmford contend that sharing land with agriculture for conservation purposes promotes only common bird and insect species, whereas judiciously sparing some lands from agriculture would be more effective for rarer species (Nature 618, 671–674; 2023). But any agricultural conservation scheme must also protect common species that are crucial for food production.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

I study the environmental effects of oyster, clam and mussel farming. In this photo from April, I’m standing in the Sacca di Goro, a shallow lagoon in Italy, south of Venice. I make the 120-kilometre round trip here from the University of Ferrara every week during sampling months — April to the end of July and November to December — to study the growing oysters.Oyster farming has a smaller ecological footprint than fish farming does because oysters do not require feeding, which can cause eutrophication — an overgrowth of nutrients that chokes off marine animal life. They also do not require any drugs, disinfectants, pesticides or any form of growth additives.The oysters in these baskets — called lanterns — are between one and four centimetres in diameter. The oyster farmers in the lagoon then move the molluscs to the open sea, where they grow to roughly 10 centimetres, or commercial size. Fishers sometimes take the lanterns out of the water to mimic tides, which are not prominent in the Mediterranean Sea. Being out of water is like going to the gym for the oyster — it builds muscle meat and texture.I don’t like to eat oysters. This can be tricky because the fishers usually offer me some. But I’m excited about the potential uses for the discarded valves, or shells. For example, they can be used to build artificial reefs, be ground up to make body scrubs or be applied instead of lime to raise the pH level of agricultural soil.To calculate the environmental impact of oyster farming, I survey the fishers and map their use of fossil fuels, plastic and other resources that might harm the environment. Then I measure how much carbon the oysters capture as they grow. I focus on the valves, which are made almost entirely of calcium carbonate.I hope to prove that oyster farming absorbs more carbon than it emits. More

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China’s large coastal animals are poorly served by biodiversity protections, a nation-wide assessment has revealed. The study1, published in Science Advances, suggests that there’s a need for improved conservation measures along China’s coasts.Study co-author Qiang He, a coastal ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, says that larger coastal animals are often overlooked. “You can see a lot of news about the giant panda and terrestrial biodiversity conservation, but you don’t see a lot of news about megafauna in coastal areas in China,” he says.To gauge how coastal animals are faring, He and his colleagues collated data on fish, mammals, birds, reptiles and cephalopods — including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish — with an adult body mass of at least 10 kilograms that live in China’s coastal habitats. They identified more than 200 species across ecosystems including salt marshes, mangrove forests, seagrass beds, coral reefs and deeper waters.They then looked at whether those species were identified as being threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List — a global inventory of species’ conservation status — and what level of protection exists in China.Almost half of the species identified (44%) are classed as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Yet 78% of the species have not been assessed for local extinction risk, and so don’t appear on China’s own Red List, or are listed as data deficient. “Even if they’re critically endangered or endangered on a global level, they are still not assessed in China,” He says. And almost three-quarters are not protected by any of China’s wildlife-protection laws.Regulation gapsThe researchers also assessed species’ importance using a measure called the FUSE index — standing for functionally unique, specialized and endangered — which scores endangered species on the basis of the importance of their roles in their ecosystems. Of the top 50 large coastal animals ranked by their FUSE score, only 17 are currently protected in China.This is a problem, says co-author Xincheng Li, an ecologist at Fudan University. Populations have declined for species including the red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis) and the critically endangered Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis). And Li says that the precise mixture of threats to most of the species the team looked at is poorly understood. Large marine species are often inadvertently killed as by-catch in fishing. But these and other creatures are also threatened by pollution, competition from invasive species and depletion of prey species owing to over-fishing.“These results point out the existing gaps in the current management system of China’s coastal protected areas,” says Baoshan Cui, a wetland ecologist at Beijing Normal University. And he says that other countries, especially those that with rapidly expanding economies, probably have similar conservation gaps.Nicholas Murray, a conservation ecologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, says the lack of protection for larger species “suggests that most coastal species in China — the small ones as well — are being similarly impacted”.The study lays important groundwork that will help conservation in these coastal zones, says Murray. “They did a lot of work to build a new database,” he says, and the more such data sets become available for analysis, the better countries such as China will be able to manage their coastal ecosystems.Better protectionsChina has made progress towards reducing overfishing in its domestic waters, says Songlin Wang, president of the Qingdao Marine Conservation Society. In 2017, the agriculture ministry adopted a ‘negative growth’ policy for its domestic fishing harvest in an attempt to reduce catch levels each year. And in June, China formally signed on to the World Trade Organization’s international agreement to end harmful fisheries subsidies. But Wang says that the slow decline in small-scale fishing won’t be enough to protect its coastal ecosystems.As a first step, He says, “the Chinese government needs to include many more of those coastal megafauna species in the nation’s register” of protected species.Wang says that this could be difficult. Although marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, porpoises and marine turtles have legal protections in China, few species of fish are protected, because of their commercial value as seafood.The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Protected areas can help, says He, but they need to be properly enforced. China has more than 200 marine protected areas, he adds, but these are poorly regulated: “There’s so many marine protected areas, but there’s no boundary information available to the public,” so there’s no way for fishers to know whether they are in a protected area.Furthermore, protected areas are often small and unconnected, says ecologist Zhonghua Ning at Beijing Normal University. This compromises their effectiveness as refuges, he says.But Wang says that marine protected areas alone are inadequate to protect large marine species — he says that better enforcement of laws requiring fishers to use gear that doesn’t trap large animals such as turtles, dolphins and sharks as by-catch would do more to protect those species. Wang says that despite regulations, fishers often modify their gear or use illegally small mesh to maximize their harvest. More

Large populations of fish help coral reefs to grow — but can’t protect against heatwaves.Credit: Barry Fackler/Getty

Minimizing land-based and sea-based human impacts at the same time might help reefs to recover from marine heatwaves, a study has found. But researchers warn that, in the absence of aggressive action to limit global warming, addressing impacts such as pollution and overfishing are insufficient to counter the growing threat. The findings — published this week in Nature1 — come as record ocean temperatures scorch reefs off the coast of Florida and scientists fear for the effects of El Niño on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.Researchers analysed 20 years of reef data from a 200-kilometre stretch of coastline on Hawai’i Island. The data included an unprecedented marine heatwave in 2015, providing the researchers with a unique opportunity to explore how factors such as wastewater run-off and fishing intensity shaped the coral reef’s response. The heatwave was the strongest in 120 years of record-keeping, and saw ocean temperatures rise to 2.2 °C above normal, with a peak at 29.4 °C.A year after the heatwave, nearly one-quarter of the reefs had lost more than 20% of their coral cover. The hardest-hit reef lost close to half of its cover. But for 18% of reefs, coral cover was unaffected or even increased.Local impactsThe team used modelling to determine which factors best explained the differences in coral-cover changes.In the 12 years leading up to the heatwave, reefs with more fish — particularly herbivorous scrapers — and lower levels of wastewater pollution experienced coral growth.Scrapers “literally scrape the reef”, says Jamison Gove, an oceanographer at the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Honolulu, Hawaii. “They not only remove fast-growing algae, but they clear space that allows for the settlement of crustose coralline algae, which is a precursor for coral growth,” he says.On the flipside, wastewater pollution from sewage disposal systems and run-off from urban environments damage coral health, says Gove. “It’s not only that you have this soup of virulent bacteria and other things that can cause coral disease,” he says. “You also have whatever everybody’s flushing down or putting down their sink. You have household chemicals, you have pharmaceuticals, so you have all sorts of toxins.”Modest gainsOverall, the researchers estimate that addressing land-based and sea-based human impacts on reefs simultaneously improves their chances of having higher levels of coral cover in the four years after a heatwave by three to six times, compared with addressing them independently. But lower pollution levels and more scrapers — factors that drove increases in coral cover before the heatwave — offered little protection against temperature spikes. Reefs with the lowest levels of urban run-off lost slightly less cover, but the presence of more fish — particularly scrapers — did not have a substantial effect on coral loss or survival.Gove says that the study reveals how human activity, both on land and in the sea, affects coral reefs, but stresses that these local impacts must be addressed in the context of action on climate change.“We can do all the local management you want, but in the decades to come, if we’re not aggressively curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, then climate change and marine heatwaves will most likely overwhelm any of the effects that we’ve identified within our paper,” he said.Terry Hughes, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia says the study has confirmed that there are three main stressors on coral reefs: overfishing, pollution and climate change. “If you clean up the water quality and rebuild depleted populations of herbivores it does help the reef to recover. But the big, big caveat is provided they have enough time to recover,” he says. “It’s no use improving the recovery rate by managing water quality and fishing if the frequency of these bleaching events continues to increase.”Hughes gives the example of back-to-back bleaching events that struck the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017, and says that climate modelling suggests that most coral reefs will experience bleaching events every year by 2050 under a business-as-usual emissions scenario.“They don’t discriminate between well-managed reefs, or a polluted and non-polluted reef,” he says. “They all fry if the temperature is high enough.” More

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RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
09 August 2023

Local human-derived stressors combine with global ocean warming to threaten coral-reef persistence. Simultaneous reduction of human-derived stressors that originate on land, such as coastal run-off, and sea-based stressors, such as fishing pressure, resulted in greater coral-reef persistence before, during and after severe heat stress than did reduction of either alone. More

The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS), adopted in 2010, ensures that the advantages arising from the use of genetic resources are distributed fairly (www.cbd.int/abs/). Ethiopia established a similar treaty four years earlier, in part to protect its rich and unique biodiversity against biopiracy. Contrary to the suggestion by ThankGod Ebenezer and his colleagues (Nature 603, 388–392; 2022), this ‘Access to Genetic Resources and Community Knowledge, and Community Rights law’ welcomes applications from non-parties to the Nagoya Protocol, as well as from parties to it (go.nature.com/3oxztad).
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More