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A global survey if coral reefs reveals that over fishing is driving resident shark species toward extinction, causing diversity deficits in reef elasmobranch ( shark and ray) assemblages. Our species-level analysis analysis revealed global declines of 60 to 73% for five common resident reef shark species and that individual shark species were not detetced at 34 to 47% of surveyed reefs.

Previous research has cast doubt on the potential for marine protected areas (MPAs) to provide refuge and fishery spillover benefits for migratory species as most MPAs are small relative to the geographic range of these species.

Accelerating ecosystem degradation has spurred proposals ti vastly expand the extent of protected areas (PCs), potentially affecting the livelihoods and well-being of indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) worldwide.

The global decline of coral reefs had led to calls for strategies that reconcile biodiversity conservation and fisheries benefits. Still considerable gaps in our understanding of the spatial ecology of ecosystem services remain. We combined spatial information on larval dispersal networks and estimated of human pressure to test the importance of connectivity for ecosystem service provision. We found that reefs receiving larvae from highly connected dispersal corridors were associated with high fish species richness. Generally larval sinks contained twice as much as fish biomass as sources and exhibited greater resilience human pressure when protected. Despite their potential to support biodiversity persistence and sustainable fisheries up to 70% of important dispersal corridors, sinks and source reefs remain unprotected, emphasizing the need to increase protection of networks of well-connected reefs.

The ocean economy is growing as commercial use of the ocean accelerates, while progress toward achieving international goals for ocean conservation and sustainability is lagging.

Climate change and other human activities are causing profound effects on marine ecosystem productivity. we show that the breeding success of seabirds is tracking hemispheric differences in ocean warming and human impacts with the strongest effects of fish-eating, surface-foraging species in the north.