143 Mitigating Risk and Increasing Resilience When Sandin’s team turned to some of the Kiribati islands with small but growing human populations, the difference was stark. Human activity—particularly the modest amount of fishing done by residents of this small country—had degraded and even destroyed some of the reefs. The results appeared to speak for themselves. Islands with no human presence had healthy reefs—those with people did not. As Sandin looked at other islands around the world— including other more distant Kiribati islands—he discovered the strict dichotomy did not hold true. Some inhabited islands that had experienced many generations of fishing still had thriving coral ecosystems. The health of an island’s reef systems was not necessarily determined by human presence. “I realized the human dimension was more than just binary,” Sandin said. “It wasn’t just presence versus absence. I knew we should start studying the variation of human use, where it works well and where it doesn’t.” The Challenge Begins A major challenge of studying ecosystems, even those as spatially concentrated as a coral reef, is the dizzying array of factors that affect their function. Sandin’s team defined 18 types of islands, based on such factors as the size of the human presence and the island’s geography. The team members decided they should find five island examples of each of the 18 classifications, meaning the project was committed to studying 90 islands. Then they decided that adding 10 islands, bringing the total to 100, would give the study a more impressive pedigree. “We rounded up to make the T-shirts look better,” Sandin joked. From the beginning, the 100 Island Challenge presented logistic hurdles. Sandin’s team had to research islands for possible inclusion, classify them, and maintain a globally dispersed atlas of candidates. The islands chosen are mostly concentrated throughout the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea. The team has attempted, whenever possible, to work with residents on each island to both ensure respect for its culture and maximize local knowledge. “Every island has a story,” Sandin said. “And that’s why we had to go bigger.” Mapping the Challenge GIS maps played a key part of building the massive atlas, giving the team members an ongoing reference as they gathered data. The team aimed to visit each island in the study at least twice to monitor changes over time. GIS also provided a way to determine specific observation sites for every island. From each of these vantage points, researchers can visualize key spatial relationships, including the location of reefs and human settlements, the size and The 100 Island Challenge is a large-scale natural experiment, investigating the independent and interacting effects of oceanography, geography, and human activities in affecting the structure and growth of coral reef communities.
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