摘要：Integrating information from a range of community members in environmental managementprovides a more complete assessment of the problem and a diversification of management options, but isdifficult to achieve. To investigate the relationship between different environmental interpretations, Icompared three distinct measures of anchor damage on coral reefs: ecological measures, perceptualmeanings, and subjective health judgments. The ecological measures identified an increase in the numberof overturned corals and a reduction in coral cover, the perceptual meanings identified a loss of visualquality, and the health judgments identified a reduction in the health of the coral reef sites associated withhigh levels of anchoring. Combining the perceptual meanings and health judgments identified that thejudgment of environmental health was a key feature that both scientific and lay participants used to describethe environment. Some participants in the survey were familiar with the coral reef environment, and otherswere not. However, they provided consistent judgment of a healthy coral reef, suggesting that thesejudgments were not linked to present-day experiences. By combining subjective judgments and ecologicalmeasures, the point at which the environment is deemed to lose visual quality was identified; for thesecoral reefs, if the level of damage rose above 10.3% and the cover of branching corals dropped below17.1%, the reefs were described as unhealthy. Therefore, by combining the information, a managementagency can involve the community in identifying when remedial action is required or when managementpolicies are effectively maintaining a healthy ecosystem
