hroughout history, people have preferentially settled along coastlines, and they continue to do so today. Coastal people make up more than half of the total human population, and coastal settlements are transforming marine habitats at a rapid pace. Coastal people have also been long engaged in the extraction of marine resources, mostly animals such as marine mammals, fi sh, and invertebrates as...

Natural hazards such as extreme coastal events can generate indirect impacts extending far beyond the exposed areas and the direct aftermath of the event. The recognition of such impacts in risk assessment is essential for preparing, mitigating against such events and for increasing the resilience of coastal communities. However the assessment is often limited to the direct impacts. This paper ...

* Corresponding author. Abstract – The Worldview-2 satellite imagery with 2-m spatial resolution and 8 spectral bands is used to map the coastal ecosystems for our study site, an offshore island of Singapore. The eastern side of the study area is used as a landfill, while the western part of the island is left natural with rich biodiversity where large stretches of seagrass meadow, mangroves an...

h e l ow of ecosystem services from coral reefs, seagrass meadows and mangrove forests sustains the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide. Faced with the global degradation of marine and coastal ecosystems, policy makers are increasingly focusing on ecosystem service valuation techniques to encourage conservation and sustainable use of marine resources. Here we provide a review and synthe...

Managing forests for multiple ecosystem services such as timber, carbon, and biodiversity requires information on ecosystem structure and management characteristics. National forest inventory data are increasingly being used to quantify ecosystem services, but they mostly provide timber management and overstory data, while data on understory shrub and herbaceous diversity are limited. We obtain...

This paper presents a quantitative analytical method for measuring functional fit between a specific ecosystem and a defined set of institutions. Functional misfits, the focus of this paper, can arise as a result of gaps in governance—a lack of institutional provision for a socioecological system component or link. The method measures such misfit using a similarity metric (simple matching). Thi...

Coastal waters are one of the most vulnerable resources that require effective monitoring programs. One of the key factors for effective coastal monitoring is the use of remote sensing technologies that significantly capture the spatiotemporal variability of coastal waters. Optical properties of coastal waters are strongly linked to components, such as colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM), c...

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has become a key instrument of contemporary environmental policy and practice. Given the increasingly important role of EBM, there is an urgent need for improved analytical approaches to assess if and to what extent EBM has been accomplished in any given case. Drawing on the vast literature on EBM, we identify five key ecosystem aspects for assessment. By linkin...

Extreme climate and weather events, such as a drought, hurricanes, or ice storms, can strongly imprint ecosystem processing and may alter ecosystem structure. Ecosystems in extreme environments are particularly vulnerable because of their adaptation to severe limitations in energy, water, or nutrients. The vulnerability can be expressed as a relatively long-lasting ecosystem response to a small...