Protecting Great Barrier Reef resilience through effective management of crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks
Fig 5
Annual coral cover change at varying intensities of COTS control.
Comparison of posterior probability distributions from Bayesian generalised linear mixed models of annual change in coral cover at increasing levels of culling effort observed during the 4th outbreak wave. Data points below probability distributions are the mean responses ±66% (thick bars) and 90% (thin bars) credible intervals. Culling effort is categorised based on the number of culling hours divided by the maximum COTS density observed during the 4th outbreak wave (see Table 1 for time period), as (1) reefs with no recorded COTS outbreak (blue); (2) reefs with recorded COTS outbreaks and above median culling effort relative to maximum COTS density (green); (3) reefs with recorded COTS outbreaks and below median culling effort relative to maximum COTS density (orange) and (4) reefs with recorded COTS outbreaks and no culling effort (red).