Seasonal,diel, and tidal movements of green jobfish (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Aprion virescens</Emphasis>, Lutjanidae) at remote Hawaiian atolls: implications for marine protected area design

Empirical data quantifying the long-term movement patterns of coral reef top predators are needed in order to design marine protected areas (MPAs) that will provide these fishes with effective, long-term protection. Acoustic telemetry was used to quantify the movements of a large coral reef top predator (Aprion virescens, Lutjanidae; Hawaiian name ‘uku’) at five atolls in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument (NWHIMNM) from May 2005 to September 2006. The study atolls were located between 23.8°N, 166.2°W and 28.5°N, 178.3°W, and were separated from their nearest receiver-equipped neighbor by distances ranging from 100 to 478 km. No inter-atoll movements by uku were detected but individuals were seasonally site-attached to core activity areas of up to 12 km in length, and ranged up to 19 km across atolls. Within their core areas, tagged uku exhibited diel and tidal habitat shifts, with the latter resulting in round trips of up to 24 km in 24 h. Seasonal uku migrations resulted in extended winter (October–April) absences from summer (May–September) core activity areas and may be linked to summer spawning. Large MPAs (i.e., entire islands, atolls or banks) would probably be required for full protection of resident populations of adult uku, but such ‘island-scale’ MPAs will not benefit fisheries unless there is significant larval supply from MPAs to neighboring fished areas, or adult emigration over time scales exceeding the 16-month monitoring period of this study. A mixed management strategy of combining smaller MPAs with conventional measures (e.g., minimum size limits, catch, and effort restrictions) may be the best approach for sustaining uku fisheries. However, this would still require relatively large MPAs (12 km in length) to contain uku short-term (diel and tidal) movements, and seasonal migrations would still take uku beyond the boundaries of MPAs of this size. These fluxes across MPA boundaries could supply fish to fisheries but, if high exploitation rates exist, fishing could eliminate key MPA benefits such as increased numbers of large, highly fecund individuals. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Design of aquifer remediation systems: (1) describing hydraulic structure and NAPL architecture using tracers

Aquifer heterogeneity (structure) and NAPL distribution (architecture) are described based on tracer data. An inverse modelling approach that estimates the hydraulic structure and NAPL architecture based on a Lagrangian stochastic model where the hydraulic structure is described by one or more populations of lognormally distributed travel times and the NAPL architecture is selected from eight possible assumed distributions. Optimization of the model parameters for each tested realization is based on the minimization of the sum of the square residuals between the log of measured tracer data and model predictions for the same temporal observation. For a given NAPL architecture the error is reduced with each added population. Model selection was based on a fitness which penalized models for increasing complexity. The technique is demonstrated under a range of hydrologic and contaminant settings using data from three small field-scale tracer tests: the first implementation at an LNAPL site using a line-drive flow pattern, the second at a DNAPL site with an inverted five-spot flow pattern, and the third at the same DNAPL site using a vertical circulation flow pattern. The Lagrangian model was capable of accurately duplicating experimentally derived tracer breakthrough curves, with a correlation coefficient of 0.97 or better. Furthermore, the model estimate of the NAPL volume is similar to the estimates based on moment analysis of field data.     

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