Abstract
Despite decades of research, the relationship between mangrove abundance and fishery productivity in nearshore environments is still controversial. A new analysis was made to explore the relationship between prawn catch in 1985–2001 in 37 countries and mangrove abundance, using the principal components–regression approach. Principal components reduced mangrove abundance and other predictor variables (latitude, tidal amplitude, coastline length, population size, rainfall, and temperature) to four orthogonal principal components, accounting for 78% of the overall data variation. Representation of mangrove abundance in both absolute (total area of mangroves) and relative (mangrove area standardized against length of coastline) terms also helps elucidate the effect of mangrove abundance on prawn catch. Regression analysis with prawn catch using these four principal components suggests that the extent of intertidal areas and organic matter availability as represented by tidal amplitude rather than relative mangrove abundance per se have a stronger influence on prawn catch in tropical nearshore environments. This approach avoids some of the common problems of past analyses, such as multi-collinearity of the predictor variables.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Professor Peter Saenger (Southern Cross University, Australia) for allowing me to use his data on the length of coastlines of tropical countries in the analysis, and to Michael Arthur for a discussion of the PCA–regression technique. The manuscript has also benefited from useful comments from the referees. This analysis would not have been possible without the good work of scientists who studied, mapped, and thought about mangroves, and the effort of FAO in making fisheries data widely available to researchers. This work was supported as part of a project on the trophic ecology of mangroves, from the Australian Research Council Large Grants scheme (A00000284).
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Communicated by G.F. Humphrey, Sydney
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Lee, S.Y. Relationship between mangrove abundance and tropical prawn production: a re-evaluation. Marine Biology 145, 943–949 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-004-1385-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-004-1385-8