There’s a widespread hypothesis that links the resilience of coral reefs with their remoteness from human activities — the farther away they are from people, the more likely corals are to bounce back from disturbances.

«The idea is that these coral reefs might serve as arks, that they could harbor biodiversity and intact ecosystems,» said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Adrian Stier of these ancient and fragile colonial organisms, most of which are under threat both locally, as from destructive fishing practices, and globally, as from ocean warming and acidification. «The hope is that these isolated areas might serve as a safe haven and, in the future, potentially repopulate areas that have been degraded.

However when Stier and colleagues put that hypothesis to the test, they found it didn’t hold. No matter how remote some populations of corals were, on average they demonstrated no more resilience to acute disturbances than reefs with a greater human influence. And, contrary to expectations, there is some evidence that areas with greater human development may recover from disturbance faster than their more isolated counterparts.

«As an ecophysiologist, I’m usually studying how one individual coral or a population of corals responds to stress,» said lead author Justin Baumann, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also at Bowdoin College in Maine. «This study was a chance to zoom out and think globally about what drives coral resilience at much larger spatial scales and to really explore relationships between human influence and resilience globally.»

Their results are published in the journal Global Change Biology.

People and Corals

The researchers’ findings challenge the long-held notion that humans are generally bad for ecosystems, and their results have significant implications for coral reef conservation and management, according to Stier.

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Materials provided by University of California — Santa Barbara. Original written by Sonia Fernandez. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.