Projects
Our projects focus on:
- Ecological and Sociocultural synthesis and analysis
- Replicated field experiments and instrumentation
- Conservation intervention field trials
- Integrated assessment and monitoring
Ocean Health Index
The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is a collaborative effort, initiated through contributions from more than 65 scientists and ocean experts and partnerships between organizations including the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Sea Around Us, Conservation International, National Geographic, and the New England Aquarium. A valuable tool for the ongoing assessment of ocean health, the OHI provides a means to advance comprehensive ocean policy and compare future progress.
4Site is utilizing the OHI to help inform decisions at our sites about how to use and protect marine ecosystems. The four individual OHI island assessments will be leveraged to address questions such as:
- What management/conservation lessons can we learn from varying health indicators across sites?
- Is a change over time at sites reflected in the OHI?
- Could OHI be fine-tuned to the sites to improve its sensitivity and applicability?
FAIR Island Project
4Site is partnering with the FAIR Island Project, which aims to translate the broader FAIR principles into a set of specific requirements and implementable activities that demonstrate how good data management practices and policies accelerate research for the benefit of all stakeholders. Its initial activities partner with 4Site as key use cases to:
- Test the effectiveness of optimized Research Data Management policies (incl. FAIR principles)
- Demonstrate the capabilities of networked machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs)
- Analyze the downstream effects of these policies on the resulting release of data in bounded, incubated, monitored working research environments
Remove Rats, Restore Islands, Revive Reefs
When rats invade islands, they decimate native wildlife – drastically decreasing terrestrial biodiversity – and alter key ecosystem functions such as seed dispersal and nutrient pathways. Often, local populations of island-nesting seabirds are eliminated. Through collaboration with the Tetiaroa Society and researchers at UC Santa Barbara, Oregon State University and Lancaster University, this project on the atoll of Tetiaroa aims to increase our understanding of how the effects of invasive rat eradication on land may improve the resilience of reef habitats.
This project takes an experimental approach to simulate the recovery of seabirds after rat eradication and assess how seabird-derived nutrients impact coral reef health. Seabirds play a key role in depositing beneficial nutrients on both islands and in adjacent coastal water, and their removal by invasive rats can result in negative changes in nutrient input that can compromise the health of island reefs. Promoting the recovery of seabirds through rat eradication should restore key nutrients and increase the health and resilience of adjacent coral reefs, buffering them against a changing climate. This research provides a unique opportunity to look at the impacts of rodents on island and marine ecosystems across the 4Site gradient, isolate key ecosystem response variables and inform management planning.
Bioacoustics Project
4Site is partnering with Cornell University and Conservation Metrics Inc. led initiative to establish a standardized and scalable demonstration of how bioacoustics can be used for, and to inform, coral reef monitoring, management, and conservation. Coral reef communities are facing unprecedented threats. While healthy reefs have complex soundscapes generated by a diverse community of species, damaged reefs emit a different array of sounds. Monitoring reef bioacoustics can provide continuous data on the health of reef communities, and provide reef conservationists quantitative ways to detect changes and measure the value of conservation actions.