With support from the Julia R. Brown Fund, MAS Marine Biodiversity and Conservation student Sabrina Tu partnered with Mālama Pūpūkea-Waimea to explore how donors can better support long-term, community-based reef stewardship in the Pūpūkea Marine Life Conservation District. Her capstone project produced a donor-facing case study, a tiered engagement tracker, and reef orthomosaics that help document changing reef conditions over time. Together, these efforts highlight how sustained funding, monitoring, and local relationships can strengthen climate adaptation and coastal stewardship.
Support from the Julia R. Brown Fund helped me complete my Capstone project with Mālama Pūpūkea-Waimea (MPW), a community-based nonprofit that has stewarded the Pūpūkea Marine Life Conservation District (MLCD) on the North Shore of Oʻahu since 2005. My project examined how donors can better sustain long-term stewardship that community based marine organizations call for, especially as reef ecosystems face compounding threats and pressures from ocean warming, coastal runoff, tourism pressure, and climate driven disturbances.
The funds supported three related deliverables. First, I developed a donor-facing case study grounded in MPW’s experience. For this, I reviewed MPW reports and management documents, literature on conservation finance, and conducted in-person interviews with funders, residents, local business owners, volunteers, and MPW partners. Those interviews also informed a tiered engagement tracker identifying local opportunities for financial and in-kind support. Lastly, I conducted large-area reef imaging to create orthomosaics, or 2D top-down reef views stitched from hundreds of images, at several high-traffic transect locations in the MPA. This work builds on baseline orthomosaics started by a previous MAS MBC student and supports MPW’s goal of developing a time series of changing reef conditions.
One of the biggest lessons came when I understood MPW’s work as a stewardship loop rather than a set of separate projects or programs. Long-term stewardship presence enables monitoring and transforms observations into evidence. This evidence, in turn, builds credibility with agencies, funders, scientists, and community partners. That credibility can then open pathways to greater support, increasing MPW’s capacity to continue stewardship.
This helped me understand why monitoring is such an important, yet commonly underfunded, part of conservation work. From the outside, monitoring can look repetitive because it often means returning to the same sites and collecting similar data year after year. But that repetition is the point. It is what makes ecological change visible, helps MPW assess whether interventions are working, and provides the evidence needed to advocate for adaptive management over time.
Fieldwork also expanded my understanding of climate adaptation. My time on the North Shore followed historic Kona Low storms that caused flooding, brown-water advisories, road disruptions, and lasting impacts on households, small businesses, and the MLCD. The impacts made some photogrammetry sites temporarily unsuitable because of poor water quality and debris, and I was not initially sure the imaging component could be completed. When conditions improved, I was able to return and complete part of the field imaging.
The impacts on the North Shore were truly devastating and underscored the need for more coordinated, preventative measures that mitigate the severity of future impacts. My project contributes to that need in a small way by connecting long-term funding for resilience with monitoring that can inform decision-making and centering funding structures based on community needs and priorities. The case study explores how donors can better support the people, relationships, and monitoring systems that sustain stewardship year after year, while the photogrammetry work provides visual evidence to support MPW and decision makers working on climate adaptation and coastal management.
Professionally, this project helped me connect my background in finance and impact investing to my current work in marine conservation. I came away understanding that financial rigor need not mean distance. There is a way to marry both, and from what I’ve learned here, it’s essential to do so; otherwise, we miss the conditions that make stewardship possible.
Blog content and images provided by Sabrina Tu – thank you!