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Hla Htun

A cocktail of land-based sources of pollution threatens coral reef ecosystems, and addressing these has become a key management and policy challenge in the State of Hawaii, other US territories, and globally. In West Maui, Hawai'i, nearly one quarter of all living corals were lost between 1995 and 2008. Onsite disposal systems (OSDS) for sewage leak contaminants into drinking water sources and nearshore waters. In recognition of this risk, the Hawaii State Department of Health (DOH) is prioritizing areas for cesspool upgrades. Independently, we applied a decision analysis process to identify priority areas to address sewage pollution from OSDS in West Maui, with the objective of reducing nearshore coral reef exposure...
Abstract (from PLOS One): Declining natural resources have led to a cultural renaissance across the Pacific that seeks to revive customary ridge-to-reef management approaches to protect freshwater and restore abundant coral reef fisheries. Effective ridge-to-reef management requires improved understanding of land-sea linkages and decision-support tools to simultaneously evaluate the effects of terrestrial and marine drivers on coral reefs, mediated by anthropogenic activities. Although a few applications have linked the effects of land cover to coral reefs, these are too coarse in resolution to inform watershed-scale management for Pacific Islands. To address this gap, we developed a novel linked land-sea modeling...
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Coastal zones are popular recreational areas that substantially contribute to social welfare. Managers can use information about specific environmental features that people appreciate, and how these might change under different management scenarios, to spatially target actions to areas of high current or potential value. We explored how snorkelers’ experience would be affected by separate and combined land and marine management actions in West Maui, HawaiĘ»i, using a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) and a spatially explicit ecosystem services model. The BBN simulates recreational attractiveness by combining snorkelers’ preferences for coastal features with experts’ opinions on ecological dynamics, snorkeler behavior,...
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