Data and code for "Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on global coral reefs"

Data and code for the study "Protection efforts have resulted in ~10% of existing fish biomass on global coral reefs" Abstract: The amount of ocean protected from fishing and other human impacts has often been used as a metric of conservation progress. However, protection efforts have highly variable outcomes that depend on local conditions, which makes it difficult to quantify what coral reef protection efforts to date have actually achieved at a global scale. Here, we develop a predictive model of how local conditions influence conservation outcomes on ~2,600 coral reef sites across 44 ecoregions, which we used to quantify how much more fish biomass there is on coral reefs compared to a modeled scenario with no protection. Our study reveals that without existing protection efforts (including both fishing restrictions and fully protected marine protected areas) there would be 21.4% less fish biomass among surveyed coral reefs: approximately 1 in every 5 kg of existing fish biomass. However, after correcting for potential oversampling within marine protected areas, we estimate that such coral reef management efforts have led to ~10% of existing fish biomass globally.