Elizabeth R Selig

Stanford University | SU · Woods Institute for the Environment

In recent decades, many marine populations have experienced major declines in abundance, but we still know little about where management interventions may help protect the highest levels of marine biodiversity. We used modeled spatial distribution data for nearly 12,500 species to quantify global patterns of species richness and two measures of end...

Warming ocean temperatures are considered to be an important cause of the degradation of the world's coral reefs. Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been proposed as one tool to increase coral reef ecosystem resistance and resilience (i.e. recovery) to the negative effects of climate change, yet few studies have evaluated their efficacy in achievin...

A variety of human activities have led to the recent global decline of reef-building corals. The ecological, social, and economic value of coral reefs has made them an international conservation priority. The success of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in restoring fish populations has led to optimism that they could also benefit corals by indirectly...

The management and conservation of the world's oceans require synthesis of spatial data on the distribution and intensity of human activities and the overlap of their impacts on marine ecosystems. We developed an ecosystem-specific, multiscale spatial model to synthesize 17 global data sets of anthropogenic drivers of ecological change for 20 marin...

People value the existence of a variety of marine species and habitats, many of which are negatively impacted by human activities. The Convention on Biological Diversity and other international and national policy agreements have set broad goals for reducing the rate of biodiversity loss. However, efforts to conserve biodiversity cannot be effectiv...

Global aquatic or ‘blue’ foods, essential to over 3.2 billion people, face challenges of maintaining supply in a changing environment while adhering to safety and sustainability standards. Despite the growing concerns over their environmental impacts, limited attention has been paid to how blue food production is influenced by anthropogenic environ...

Coastal communities are on the frontlines of three accelerating global change drivers, climate change, blue growth, and the expansion of area-based conservation, leading to a ''triple exposure'' scenario. Despite efforts to maximize social benefits from climate, development, and conservation, externally driven processes can converge to amplify vuln...

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich¹, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats², and contribute to the health³, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities...

Monitoring marine use is essential to effective management but is extremely challenging, particularly where capacity and resources are limited. To overcome these limitations, satellite imagery has emerged as a promising tool for monitoring marine vessel activities that are difficult to observe through publicly available vessel-tracking data. Howeve...

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can be produced in ways that are more environmentally...

Injustices are prevalent in food systems, where the accumulation of vast wealth is possible for a few, yet one in ten people remain hungry. Here, for 194 countries we combine aquatic food production, distribution and consumption data with corresponding national policy documents and, drawing on theories of social justice, explore whether barriers to...

Fishers have pronounced vulnerabilities to labour exploitation and modern slavery. Regulatory efforts to mitigate fisher labour exploitation through domestic modern slavery legislation, and through the ratification and implementation of The International Labour Organization’s Work in Fishing Convention (C188) have had varying success. This heteroge...

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can often be produced in ways that are more environme...

Labor abuse on fishing vessels and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing violate human rights, jeopardize food security, and deprive governments of revenues. We applied a multi-method approach, combining new empirical data with satellite information on fishing activities and vessel characteristics to map risks of labor abuse and IUU fis...

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world’s largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process ai...

Aquatic foods from marine and freshwater systems are critical to the nutrition, health, livelihoods, economies and cultures of billions of people worldwide, but climate-related hazards may compromise their ability to provide these benefits. Here, we estimate national-level aquatic food system climate risk using an integrative food systems approach...

Humanity has never benefited more from the ocean as a source of food, livelihoods, and well-being, yet on a global scale this has been accompanied by trajectories of degradation and persistent inequity. Awareness of this has spurred policymakers to develop an expanding network of ocean governance instruments, catalyzed civil society pressure on the...

Ocean activities are rapidly expanding as Blue Economy discussions gain traction, creating new potential synergies and conflicts between sectors. To better manage ocean sectors and their development, we need to understand how they interact and the respective outcomes of these interactions. To provide a first comprehensive picture of the situation,...

Recent studies suggest that the pervasive impacts on global fishery resources caused by stressors such as overfishing and climate change could dramatically increase the likelihood of fishery conflict. However, existing projections do not consider wider economic, social, or political trends when assessing the likelihood of, and influences on, future...

We are approaching a reckoning point in 2020 for global targets that better articulate the interconnections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainable development. The Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD’s) post-2020 global biodiversity framework and targets will be developed as we enter the last decade to meet the Sustainable D...

Aim Mega‐diverse coral reef ecosystems are declining globally, necessitating conservation prioritizations to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services of sites with high functional integrity to promote persistence. In practice however, the design of marine‐protected area (MPA) systems often relies on broad classifications of habitat class and siz...

In recognition of the importance of nature, its contributions to people and role in underpinning sustainable development, governments adopted a Strategic Plan on Biodiversity 2011-2020 through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) containing 20 ‘Aichi Biodiversity Targets’ and integrated many of these into the Sustainable Development Goals (...

Many human populations are dependent on marine ecosystems for a range of benefits, but we understand little about where and to what degree people rely on these ecosystem services. We created a new conceptual model to map the degree of human dependence on marine ecosystems based on the magnitude of the benefit, susceptibility of people to a loss of...

Many of the world's fisheries are unassessed, with little information about population status or risk of overfishing. Unassessed fisheries are particularly predominant in developing countries and in small‐scale fisheries, where they are important for food security. Several catch‐only methods based on time series of fishery catch and commonly availa...

Fishery managers must often reconcile conflicting estimates of population status and trend. Superensemble models, commonly used in climate and weather forecasting, may provide an effective solution. This approach uses predictions from multiple models as covariates in an additional “superensemble” model fitted to known data. We evaluated the potenti...

Background The integrity of ocean ecosystems are currently under threat from a suite of anthropogenic drivers including climate change, over-fishing, land-based pollution, and resource exploitation. Recent research has shown that this degradation is likely to lead to negative, long-term livelihood, biodiversity, and economic impacts. In view of the...

The exploitation status of marine fisheries stocks worldwide is of critical importance for food security, ecosystem conservation, and fishery sustainability. Applying a suite of data-limited methods to global catch data, combined through an ensemble modeling approach, we provide quantitative estimates of exploitation status for 785 fish stocks. Fif...

Hundreds of millions of people obtain nutrition and livelihoods from small-scale fisheries, many of which are fully exploited or overexploited. However, we lack a comprehensive approach for analyzing which factors affect management performance. We conducted a literature review of approximately 390 studies to assess drivers of success for different...

Human pressures on the ocean are thought to be increasing globally, yet we know little about their patterns of cumulative change, which pressures are most responsible for change, and which places are experiencing the greatest increases. Managers and policymakers require such information to make strategic decisions and monitor progress towards manag...

Interacting drivers and pressures in many parts of the world are greatly undermining the long-term health and wellbeing of coastal human populations and marine ecosystems. However, we do not yet have a well-formed picture of the nature and extent of the human poverty of coastal communities in these areas. In this paper, we begin to fill the gap and...

International and regional policies aimed at managing ocean ecosystem health need quantitative and comprehensive indices to synthesize information from a variety of sources, consistently measure progress, and communicate with key constituencies and the public. Here we present the second annual global assessment of the Ocean Health Index, reporting...

Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries contain fish stocks of critical importance for millions of individuals and thousands of fishing communities. These fish stocks harvested by small-scale fisheries (SSF) come from some of the richest and most diverse ecosystems of the world. This emphasizes the need for ecosystem stewardship that can contr...

More diverse communities are thought to be more stable-the diversity-stability hypothesis-due to increased resistance to and recovery from disturbances. For example, high diversity can make the presence of resilient or fast growing species and key facilitations among species more likely. How natural, geographic biodiversity patterns and changes in...

Effective spatial management in the ocean requires a network of conservation areas that are connected by larval and adult dispersal. We propose a conceptual framework for including the likely impacts of a changing climate on marine connectivity, and synthesize information on the relationships between changing ocean temperature and acidification, co...

Stock status is a key parameter for evaluating the sustainability of fishery resources and developing corresponding management plans. However, the majority of stocks are not assessed, often as a result of insufficient data and a lack of resources needed to execute formal stock assessments. The working group involved in this publication focused...

Spatially intimate symbioses, such as those between scleractinian corals and unicellular algae belonging to the genus Symbiodinium, can potentially adapt to changes in the environment by altering the taxonomic composition of their endosymbiont communities. We quantified the spatial relationship between the cumulative frequency of thermal stress ano...

Species status scores for EEZ regions by the four weighting schemes applied. Weighting schemes are shown in Fig. 1. When Vulnerable and Endangered were weighted more heavily, as in Logistic B, the scores were lower. (TIF)

Species richness of assessed species within EEZs. Mean species counts are provided across bands of latitude (1 to 342) and longitude (12 to 458) as a greyed histogram in the margins. (TIF)

Average extinction risk. In our analysis we subtracted the weighted average of extinction risk from 1, and multiplied by 100. An average risk of 100 would mean all species are at Least Concern and a score of 0 would indicate all are Extinct. We did not include extinct species in our analysis, so the lowest possible score is 20 for all being Critica...

Percent change in average extinction risk by excluding different taxa in a jacknife analysis. A higher percent change means that excluding a particular taxon increased the recalculated average extinction risk by that much percentage of the original score (Figure S4). The range of differences was dominated by the exclusion of marine mammals, positiv...

Pressures and weights used for species and habitats scores. Each column is a pressure that was used in the model. For each habitat and for all species, the relative contribution of each of the ecological pressures to the overall pressure score was based on whether they were ranked as having ‘high’ (score = 3), ‘medium’ (score = 2) or ‘low’ (score =...

Resilience measures used for the species and habitats assessments. Indicators that were used for each of the habitats or the species sub-goal are denoted with an ‘X’. Abbreviations in the table are as follows: The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), World...

Species status per region and globally, with status scores recalculated excluding each taxon (Jackknife analysis). The differences between the ‘all taxa included’ status score and the scores with each taxon excluded individually are also presented averaged across all countries (mean ±SD) and as a percent difference (i.e. divided by the all taxa sta...

Number of species by taxonomic group for assessed, mapped and all catalogued species. Catalogued numbers include many more species beyond the taxonomic group assessed. For example, only reef-building scleractinian corals, octocorals and hydrocorals were assessed, but Cnidaria include many other species including jellyfish, hydroids, and anemones. O...

Percent of species assessed within EEZs relative to those that have been mapped. This map shows the number of species that have been assessed by IUCN out of all the marine species that have a distribution map from Aquamaps [28] or IUCN data [29]–[34]. Although nearly all species in the Arctic appear to have been assessed, these high numbers reflect...

Score results for biodiversity (BD) and each dimension for the habitat (HAB) and species (SPP) calculations. (DOCX)

Supporting Methods and Results. (DOC)

Mean percent difference between the status scores calculated across all taxa and the status scores obtained excluding one of the taxonomic groups. Status scores were calculated for each region excluding each taxonomic group (Table S7) and the mean value for all these scores was taken. Then the difference between these values and the scores that inc...

Histograms of IUCN extinction risk categories by number of species in each category. (TIF)

Taxonomic groupings and counts for species in the analysis. Species counts by extinction risk category were limited to those assessed with a defined geographic distribution available from either IUCN or the Aquamaps species distribution database [28]. Total unassessed numbers are derived from species in the Aquamaps species distribution database [2...

Pearson adjusted correlation coefficients (adjusted r2) of the linear regression of overall habitat score versus individual habitat scores. The correlations were obtained separately for reporting regions within three broad latitudinal ranges: tropical (TR, −30° to +30°), temperate and sub-tropical (TT, −30° to −60°, +30° to +60°) and boreal (BO, >6...

Weights used for weighted-average assessment of species, based on IUCN risk categories established by Butchart et al . 2007. (DOCX)

Number of catalogued, mapped and assessed species. The assessed and mapped counts (see Table S3 for more detailed breakdown) are given by coarse taxon, and as percentage of species catalogued. All numbers come from Bouchet [24], except for Mammalia [25] and Reptilia [26]. (DOCX)

Introduction Approach and methods Potential ecosystem service value: economic values irrespective of use Realised services: valuing ecosystem services by considering their use Essential services: valuing the ecosystem services the poor rely upon Estimating all benefits to the poor: essential services and payments for environmental services Conclusi...

Managing coral reefs for resilience to climate change is a popular concept but has been difficult to implement because the empirical scientific evidence has either not been evaluated or is sometimes unsupportive of theory, which leads to uncertainty when considering methods and identifying priority reefs. We asked experts and reviewed the scientifi...

Methods and Results. (DOC)

Multi-dimensional scaling of the responses to the (a) 31 and (b) top 8 factors evaluated for perceived effects of the factors on coral reef resilience. (TIF)

Pair-wise matrix of the Pearson product correlation coefficients for comparisons of the resilience rankings produced for the study sites in Karimunjawa. Scores for individual factors were not scaled in the method highlighted in the first (our study of 31 factors) and 5th [16] columns and rows. Scaling for the others is continuous, based on the perc...

Map of Karimunjawa Islands and associated coral reefs and the 43 sites studied for resilience to climate change disturbances. Sites were split evenly into three groups based on the 11 key evidence-based factors and colored green for high, yellow for medium, and red for low climate resilience. Values next to sites are the rankings based on the 11 ke...

Empirical evidence for factors relating to resistance and the evidence score (−5 to +5) based on evaluations from 28 coral reef experts. (DOC)

Empirical evidence for factors relating to recovery and the evidence score (−5 to +5) based on evaluations from 28 coral reef experts. (DOC)

The ocean plays a critical role in supporting human well-being, from providing food, livelihoods and recreational opportunities to regulating the global climate. Sustainable management aimed at maintaining the flow of a broad range of benefits from the ocean requires a comprehensive and quantitative method to measure and monitor the health of coupl...

Coral reefs are threatened by human activities on both the land (e.g., deforestation) and the sea (e.g., overfishing). Most conservation planning for coral reefs focuses on removing threats in the sea, neglecting management actions on the land. A more integrated approach to coral reef conservation, inclusive of land-sea connections, requires an und...

The benefits provided by a healthy ocean are receiving increasing attention in policy and management spheres. A fundamental challenge with assessing ocean health and ecosystem services is that we lack a scientific framework for expressing ecosystem conditions quantitatively in relation to management goals. Here we outline and operationalize a conce...

Poverty and biodiversity loss are two of the world's dire challenges. Claims of conservation's contribution to poverty alleviation, however, remain controversial. Here, we assess the flows of ecosystem services provided to people by priority habitats for terrestrial conservation, considering the global distributions of biodiversity, physical factor...

Effects of changing state definitions. (PDF)

There has been substantial recent change in coral reef communities. To date, most analyses have focussed on static patterns or changes in single variables such as coral cover. However, little is known about how community-level changes occur at large spatial scales. Here, we develop Markov models of annual changes in coral and macroalgal cover in th...

Aim To identify hypotheses for how climate change affects long-term population persistence that can be used as a framework for future syntheses of ecological responses to climate change. Location Global. Methods We surveyed ecological and evolutionary concepts related to how a changing climate might alter population persistence. We organized establ...

The highest diversity coral reefs in the world, located in the Coral Triangle, are threatened by a variety of local stresses including pollution, overfishing, and destructive fishing in addition to climate change impacts, such as increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and ocean acidification. As climate change impacts increase, coral reef vuln...

Background/Question/Methods Global climate change has the potential to alter the spatial structure of ecosystems. Ecosystem management efforts are generally spatially explicit, setting up a potential conflict between the effectiveness of management today and in the future. Theoretical models project that changing spatial structure of communities...

Aim Coral reefs are widely considered to be particularly vulnerable to changes in ocean temperatures, yet we understand little about the broad-scale spatio-temporal patterns that may cause coral mortality from bleaching and disease. Our study aimed to characterize these ocean temperature patterns at biologically relevant scales. Location Global, wi...

Coral cover has declined on reefs worldwide with particularly acute losses in the Caribbean. Despite our awareness of the broad-scale patterns and timing of Caribbean coral loss, there is little published information on: (1) finer-scale, subregional patterns over the last 35 yr, (2) regional-scale trends since 2001, and (3) macroalgal cover changes...

AIC values for all models examined. The best model is the one with the smallest AIC value. In this case, the best model is one in which MPA modifies the slope and intercept and ocean modifies the intercept only. Models with AICs that exceed 18650 are designated with arrows. (0.39 MB TIF)

Coefficient estimates for the MPA versus non-MPA model. The 95% credibility intervals (thin light grey line) and the 50% credibility intervals (thick dark grey line) as well as point estimates (median) of the posterior distributions for all parameters in the MPA versus non-MPA model using a Bayesian approach to fit the model. There is a 95% probabi...

Supporting methods (0.11 MB DOC)

The number of reefs by the year of MPA establishment for the (A) Caribbean and (B) Indo-Pacific. (0.58 MB TIF)

Generalized additive mixed models (non-parametric estimation) for the (A) Caribbean and (B) Indo-Pacific. There is no evidence of a changepoint in the Caribbean, but there is in the Indo-Pacific. The 95% confidence intervals are shown with dashed lines. The models have been smoothed with a 5-year running mean. (0.55 MB TIF)

The relationship between the MPA effect on slope (change in coral cover) and the distance of non-MPAs surveys from MPAs. The loglikelihood (solid black line) is maximized at 200 km, where approximately 60% of the non-MPA data has been paired in a structural unit with MPA data (dashed green line). MPA effect on slope and confidence intervals (grey d...

R2 for MPA versus non-MPA model. NA denotes the lack of a predictor for the calculation of R2. (0.02 MB DOC)

R2 for MPA-only models in the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific. R2 can only be calculated at level 1 for these models. (0.02 MB DOC)

Materials and methods details for the sources and treatment of GIS data to create the ecozone maps and individual threat maps used to build the cumulative impact map

Map of the shallow water (<200 m) ecosystem designations that were used in the global model. Large amounts of soft bottom, “rocky reef,” and very little coral reef area result in a poor estimate of cumulative impacts of anthropogenic threats on atolls and banks in the NWHI with this model. The “quick fix” version of the global model reclassified th...

Many marine scientists have concluded that coral reefs are moving toward or are locked into a seaweed-dominated state. However, because there have been no regional- or global-scale analyses of such coral reef "phase shifts," the magnitude of this phenomenon was unknown. We analyzed 3581 quantitative surveys of 1851 reefs performed between 1996 and...

Effective and comprehensive regional-scale marine conservation requires fine-grained data on the spatial patterns of threats and their overlap. To address this need for the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (Monument) in Hawaii, USA, spatial data on 14 recent anthropogenic threats specific to this region were gathered or created, including...