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-The islands of the Polynesia subregion of Oceania as identified by the United Nations Statistics Division (https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/) .
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Humans are dependent upon ecosystems for the production of goods and services necessary for their well-being (Daily, 1997). As the service provider units (SPUs) for these benefits of nature (Anderson et al., 2015), ecosystems need to be managed in a way that maximizes their persistence on the planet. Part of that management effort includes knowing...
Citations
... Several indicators and methods have also been developed to improve the accuracy of ecological threat assessment on islands, such as the Natural Ecosystem Damage Index (NEDI), Social Ecosystem Support Index (SESI), Island Ecological Vulnerability Index (IEVI), habitat quality, and tourism carrying capacity (Oleson et al., 2018;Xie et al., 2021). Spatial visualization techniques have gained importance, and Spatiotemporal quantification of ecosystem quality has effectively supported sustainable tourism decision-making on islands (Sayre et al., 2019). However, these spatial techniques mainly focus on the changes in physical element variables and lack spatial interaction with tourists. ...
The expansion of the global tourism market has accelerated the development of small tourist islands. The rapid growth of tourist scale and activity intensity poses a potential threat to the fragile ecosystems of small islands. This article focuses on the ecological stresses small tourism islands face in their development. Compared with similar studies, we found a more flexible way to measure ecological stress of current activities. We show a framework for ecological stress assessment on small rural islands and illustrate it with Weizhou Island, China. It reveals a new approach to combining ecological footprint, geographic data, and visitor activity data. This combination enables a spatial linkage between biophysical and social surveys. To verify the validity of the assessment framework, we assessed the spatial distribution of ecosystem loss on the island using habitat quality. A multi‐scale geographically weighted model describes the spatial correlation between ecological stress and habitat quality. Real‐world application cases were used to test the usability and practical use of the policy assessment framework. We provide methodological and application‐based contributions to support the sustainable development of small tourist islands. Overall, the assessment framework offers a reliable solution for systematically collecting, analyzing, and reporting ecological stresses faced by small tourist islands.
... Moreover, the rate of invasion is increasing, with new invasive threats expected to emerge and current low-impact threats expected to worsen with climate change (Hulme, 2009;Seebens et al., 2017). Ongoing efforts in biogeographic mapping and data science are improving global biodiversity datasets and our understanding of the distribution and impact of invasive species (Joppa et al., 2016;Sayre et al., 2019). Continued commitment and investment into monitoring techniques that focus on invasive species detection and multispecies interactions, in addition to the generation of tools to analyze global data on invasion and predict threats, can highlight important hotspots where seabird losses can be prevented (Ricciardi et al., 2021). ...
Seabirds are one of the most threatened bird groups on the planet, with approximately 30% at risk of extinction. The primary cause of population decline and extinction are non-native species introduced to islands, such as mammals, and which subsequently prey on seabirds or damage habitats. These “invasive species” are impacting 46% of seabird species and over 170 million individual seabirds globally. Of seabirds impacted, 66% are currently listed as globally threatened on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, highlighting the urgent need to remove the threat of invasive species to prevent seabird extinctions. In this chapter we discuss these impacts in detail, including a brief history of invasion processes that have led to this global problem. We also describe emerging invasive species threats and investigate how climate change will further exacerbate the impacts of invasive species on seabirds. We conclude this chapter with a discussion on the successful management and reduction of invasive species, which have resulted in substantial conservation gains for seabirds and whole island ecosystems worldwide.
... Therefore, the water assimilation is used herein as the core factor to measure the environmental assimilative capacity. 3. The ecosystem services dimension refers to the ability of ecosystems within a certain time and space to provide services such as ecological regulation, ecological support, and ecological culture 69 . Coral reef islands have the characteristics of land-sea transition patches, and their ecosystem service capacity should be considered from both terrestrial ecosystem and marine ecosystem 70,71 . Among them, the marine is dominated by coral reef ecosystem services, which is also a unique feature of the CORE-CC. ...
Coral reef islands provide precious living space and valuable ecological services for human beings, and its sustainability cannot be ignored under the pressure of human activities. Carrying capacity (CC) assessment has gradually become an important means to measure sustainability of islands. However, there is little comprehensive evaluation of the carrying capacity of coral reef islands, and traditional evaluation methods are difficult to express the social-ecological characteristics of coral reef islands. The present paper proposes a comprehensive assessment model for coral reef island carrying capacity (CORE-CC) which comprises dimensions of resources supply, environmental assimilative, ecosystem services, and socio-economic supporting. According to the characteristics of the coral reef islands, the core factors and indicators of each dimension are selected and the corresponding assessment index system of "pressure-support" is constructed. The assessment involves (1) identification of carrying dimensions and core factors, (2) pressure/support measurement and (3) assessment of carrying state. A case study is conducted in Zhaoshu Island of China, demonstrating the applicability of CORE-CC model and serving as a reference for adaptive management.
Primary forests and natural landscapes in Asia and the Pacific are under increasing pressure and threats driven by population growth, migration and conflict, globalization and economic growth, urbanization, mining and infrastructure development, agriculture and planted forest expansion, forest fires and invasive species. Many of these threats are increasingly exacerbated by climate change. To address these threats, FAO and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), lead center of the CGIAR research programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA), have developed a roadmap for the conservation of primary forests in Asia and the Pacific, building upon state-of-the-art knowledge and extensive consultation of key regional stakeholders. This publication uses a remote-sensing methodology to accurately and consistently identify and delineate the remaining ‘intact forests’ and ‘contiguous intact forests’ in the Asia-Pacific region over large areas, over long periods of time, and at reasonable costs. It illustrates the huge diversity of forest formations in Asia and the Pacific and calls for a better understanding of the dynamic at stake in forest ecosystems and surrounding landscapes at finer scale. It proposes a set of recommendations, inviting policymakers and other relevant stakeholders to adopt an integrated landscape perspective and to combine different mechanisms and tools at different scales, including protected areas and other area-based conservation measures, to support effective primary forest conservation.
