The influence of multiple stressors on the spatial distribution of corals

Coral reef ecosystems are widely threatened by global change, yet the cumulative impacts of multiple interacting stressors remain difficult to quantify over space and time. We evaluate how long-term artisanal fishing effort, blast fishing, human population density, and marine protected areas (MPAs) interact with biophysical and seascape variables to influence the spatial distribution of corals in a biodiverse, but heavily impacted ecosystem.
To address these challenges, we combined satellite habitat mapping, indigenous and local knowledge, and generalized linear mixed-effects models to assess how stressors and seascape characteristics shape the occurrence of living coral. This integrative approach allowed us to capture both ecological and social processes at an ecosystem scale.
Coral was the dominant habitat in only 30% of the study area. The strongest predictor of coral distribution was seascape configuration: corals were more likely to be in compact reef patches. Coral presence was al..., Study site
The Philippines, located in the global center of marine biodiversity, supports 21,983 km2 of coral reefs, and is a global priority for conservation due to the high threats to the region (Halpern et al., 2008; Roberts et al., 2002) and a relatively high resilience to coral bleaching (Sully et al., 2019). The Danajon Bank (10˚15’0’N, 124˚8’0’E) is a double barrier reefs in the central Philippines that sits off the northern edge of Bohol – a province characterized by small-scale farming and high levels of erosion (Provincial Government of Bohol, 2011). Several characteristics of the Danajon Bank potentially enable it to resist anthropogenic stressors. Such characteristics include high biodiversity and low incidence of coral bleaching (excluding the 1998 bleaching event) (Bayley et al., 2019; Philippine Coral Bleaching Watch, 2013; Sully et al., 2019), although data for many stressors are sparse or at coarse scales (Table S1; Data Sources). Located at the southern end of the shel..., , # The influence of multiple stressors on the spatial distribution of corals

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.z34tmpgpt](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z34tmpgpt)

## Description of the data and file structure

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### Files and variables

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R code used to analyze data are available at [https://github.com/jselgrath/stressors_and_coral_reefs](https://github.com/jselgrath/stressors_and_coral_reefs) or\
the archived release of this GitHub repository: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17459945](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17459945)

Fishing data were collected from participatory mapping interviews with male fishers and methods were approved by University of British Columbia's Human Behavioural Research Ethics Board (H07-00577). All respondents were given anonymous codes which are used throughout this repository.

Distance variables are in kilometers (km) unless otherwise noted.

### Terms

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Barangay = small government unit (usually a village, but also a neighborhood in a large city).
..., We have received permission from our participants to publish de identified data in the public domain. Data are highly summarized and have no information linking information to respondents.