A trophic model of the coral reef ecosystem of La Parguera, Puerto Rico: synthesizing fisheries and ecological data
"La Parguera, Puerto Rico, a well-studied Caribbean reef system, is showing signs of overfishing and thus, is a good candidate to evaluate fishery policy scenarios using ecosystem modeling. The first steps taken to build a plausible ecosystem model of the...
Long-term monitoring of habitats and reef fish found inside and outside the U.S. Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument: A comparative assessment.
"The primary objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICR), a marine protected area in St John, US Virgin Islands. Surveys of habitat and fishes inside and outside of VICR were conducted in 20...
Chemical contamination in southwest Puerto Rico: A survey of contaminants in the coral Porites astreoides.
"Coral (Porites astreoides) from eight sites in southwest Puerto Rico were analyzed for approximately 150 chemical contaminants, to provide a preliminary characterization of environmental contamination in the corals, and assess the relationships between c...
Shifting baselines, marine reserves, and Leopold's biotic ethic
"Different human expectations and environmental ethics are key factors preventing the creation of marine reserve networks. People are skeptical about the benefits of no-take marine reserves because they have adjusted to scarcity and have low expectations ...
Cross-shelf habitat utilization patterns of reef fishes in southwestern Puerto Rico
"In June 2000, the National Ocean Service and University of Puerto Rico initiated a long-term reef-fish-monitoring program in La Parguera, Puerto Rico. Objectives of this ongoing work are to: 1) develop spatially-explicit estimates of reef fish habitat ut...
Movement of fishes (Grunts: Haemulidae) across the coral reef seascape: A review of scales, patterns and processes
"Reef fish movements over short and long time frames have important consequences for identifying essential fish habitat, quantifying ecological flows across the seascape and designing marine reserves. We use grunts (Haemulidae) as a representative model g...
Nocturnal fish movement and trophic flow across habitat boundaries in a coral reef ecosystem (SW Puerto Rico).
"Few studies have quantified the extent of nocturnal cross-habitat movements for fish, or the influence of habitat adjacencies on nutrient flows and trophodynamics. To investigate the patterns of nocturnal cross-boundary movements of fish and quantify tro...
A trophic model of the coral reef ecosystem of La Parguera, Puerto Rico: synthesizing fisheries and ecological data