, 2009) may act as flow and fish migration barriers. This emphasizes the need to maintain long-term monitoring programs to provide feedback on ecosystem condition, selleck screening library linked with adaptive management programs (Lindenmayer and Likens, 2009 and Meals et al., 2010). The protection of coral reefs from human pressures on regional and local scales, such as increased fluxes of freshwater, sediments and nutrients, is particularly pertinent

in the context of global environmental changes, such as rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification, increase in severity of tropical storms and sea level rise (Anthony et al., 2011, Carpenter et al., 2008 and Pandolfi et al., 2011). Recent research has confirmed the ongoing degradation of coral reef ecosystems around the world (Bruno and Selig, 2007, De’ath et al., 2012 and Gardner CB-839 solubility dmso et al., 2003), but global examples of watershed management demonstrating the halting or reversing of coral reef decline are not readily available. Our global review demonstrates that transformative change in agricultural management for coastal ecosystem outcomes is achievable. For coral reef ecosystems, future protection demands policy focused on desired ecosystem outcomes,

targeted regulatory approaches, upscaling of watershed management, and long-term maintenance of scientifically robust monitoring programs linked with adaptive management. Implementing these recommendations will increase the resilience of desired, coral-dominated states within a timeframe (years to decades) where more extreme perturbations

Phosphoglycerate kinase associated with climate change are expected. We thank the CSIRO, AIMS and anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on earlier versions of the paper, K. Guidetti and J. MacKeen for literature searches, Matthew Slivkoff (In-situ Marine Optics) for the processed satellite image, and Irena Zagorskis and ‘Reefs at Risk’ for the global threat map. We acknowledge the financial support from the CSIRO and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “
“As a boy growing up at Littlehampton on the south coast of England, summer holidays were spent on the resort’s safe, sandy, beaches although one learnt quickly to keep away from those areas of the shore nearest the mouth of the River Arun. For from here, as the tide ebbed and this fast river raced seaward, the contents of the town’s sewers were discharged untreated into it and the easterly flowing long-shore drift brought many unmentionables onto the otherwise super bathing beaches. Later, as a young man, summers were spent on the same beaches as a lifeguard and my colleagues and I had to deal with the sewage complaints of irate parents. And, since I was in and out of the water every day my sympathies were all with them. Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, Southern Water (or its state predecessor) built a beachside central receiving facility for Littlehampton’s sewage and pumped it through a 3.3 km-long pipeline out to sea – but still largely untreated.