Assembling Reef Communities

The Viability of Community-Based Tourism Initiatives in Rural Bonaire

Executive Summary
Having tourism to be interlaced into all parts of its society, Bonaire now suffers a sequence of events that threatens its ecological sustainability, carrying capacity, and future prosperity with solutions found only in interlocked complication. However, this can be disentangled by empowerment, capacity-building, and resource-based support for bottom-up tourism initiatives from the grassroots community, especially those located in rural Bonaire. This idea is better elaborated through the framework of community-based tourism, an alternative to mass tourism that is found to be detrimental to many. Thus, the research conducted for this report is an exploration on the enabling and the constraining factors affecting the viability of community-based tourism in rural Bonaire which is based on the established theory and practice of successful grassroots community tourism initiatives as points of reference. Utilizing qualitative approach, the data is collected from a fieldwork on Bonaire as well as a series of in-depth interviews conducted with purposive sampling. Drawing our findings together into a cohesive framework, we analyze how the different factors interact with each other before determining a series of recommendations on how to mitigate constraining factors, capitalize enabling factors, and empower the vision of the community.

Date
2023
Data type
Research report
Theme
Governance
Research and monitoring
Report number
University of Groningen
Geographic location
Bonaire

Coral Reef Arks: An In Situ Mesocosm and Toolkit for Assembling Reef Communities

Coral reefs thrive and provide maximal ecosystem services when they support a multilevel trophic structure and grow in favorable water quality conditions that include high light levels, rapid water flow, and low nutrient levels. Poor water quality and other anthropogenic stressors have caused coral mortality in recent decades, leading to trophic downgrading and the loss of biological complexity on many reefs. Solutions to reverse the causes of trophic downgrading remain elusive, in part because efforts to restore reefs are often attempted in the same diminished conditions that caused coral mortality in the first place. Coral Arks, positively buoyant, midwater structures, are designed to provide improved water quality conditions and supportive cryptic biodiversity for translocated and naturally recruited corals to assemble healthy reef mesocosms for use as longterm research platforms. Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS), passive settlement devices, are used to translocate the cryptic reef biodiversity to the Coral Arks, thereby providing a "boost" to natural recruitment and contributing ecological support to the coral health. We modeled and experimentally tested two designs of Arks to evaluate the drag characteristics of the structures and assess their long-term stability in the midwater based on their response to hydrodynamic forces. We then installed two designs of Arks structures at two Caribbean reef sites and measured several water quality metrics associated with the Arks environment over time. At deployment and 6 months after, the Coral Arks displayed enhanced metrics of reef function, including higher flow, light, and dissolved oxygen, higher survival of translocated corals, and reduced sedimentation and microbialization relative to nearby seafloor sites at the same depth. This method provides researchers with an adaptable, long-term platform for building reef communities where local water quality conditions can be adjusted by altering deployment parameters such as the depth and site.

Date
2023
Data type
Scientific article
Theme
Research and monitoring
Document
Geographic location
Curacao