ASU-Conservation International Professor of Practice Jack Kittinger recently co-authored a journal publication titled “Bright spots among the world’s coral reefs” in Nature.

The paper presents compiled data and analysis from research conducted in more than 2,500 coral reefs around the world. This novel approach seeks to find solutions to reef degradation due to human activity by studying what the authors refer to as ‘outliers.’ These are identified coral reef areas that are either doing extremely well (bright spots) or very poorly (dark spots).

Their results indicate “investments in strengthening fisheries governance, particularly aspects such as participation and property rights, could facilitate innovative conservation actions that help communities defy expectations of global reef degradation.”