Assessing the impact of coral reef community management in the Kingdom of Tonga

In recent decades, local approaches to marine management have become increasingly popular as a tool to mitigate stressors on coral reefs. However, assessing the efficacy of local management involves being able to determine its impact, or the difference it makes over the counterfactual condition of no management. This thesis uses Tonga's Special Management Area (SMA) program as a case study to understand the ecological impacts of community-based marine management on coral reef social-ecological systems. First, Smallhorn-West provides a detailed description of Tonga's coral reef social-ecological system by: i) building an extensive socio-environmental spatial data set for Tonga's coral reefs from various global layers and the 2016 national census; ii) completing the first national coral reef status report for Tonga consisting of ecological surveys at 370 sites throughout the country, and iii) synthesizing the current status and future prospects of Tonga's SMA program. This information is then used to i) look back to conduct an impact evaluation of all existing management areas in Tonga and ii) look ahead to predict the potential future impacts of various new management configurations. Here, Smallhorn-West shows that Tonga's approach to local marine management has yielded positive impacts to natural resource management and biodiversity conservation, and has been able to avoid issues that plague many marine protected areas