Anthropogenic disturbance modifies spatial patterns of reef sharks

Abstract Anthropogenic activities are degrading coral reef ecosystems and driving global declines in reef‐associated sharks and rays, yet the role of non‐extractive human disturbance such as tourism and coastal development remains poorly understood. We quantified how environmental conditions and human presence shape reef shark and ray distributions across seven Caribbean reef systems using 995 Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) deployments conducted between 2012 and 2017 across six inhabited Dutch Caribbean islands and the remote Saba Bank. Habitat characteristics and proxies of human pressure were quantified for each site, including coastal building density and SCUBA diving activity derived from geotagged social media data. We recorded 455 elasmobranchs, dominated by Caribbean reef sharks ( Carcharhinus perezi ), southern stingrays ( Hypanus americanus ) and nurse sharks ( Ginglymostoma cirratum ). Reef shark abundance declined sharply with increasing coastal development and diving intensity on populated reefs despite otherwise suitable habitat conditions, whereas nurse sharks and southern stingrays were less sensitive to human activity and more strongly associated with habitat features. In contrast, on the minimally disturbed Saba Bank, elasmobranch distributions were primarily explained by environmental gradients such as depth and habitat complexity. Synthesis and applications : Species‐specific sensitivities mean that non‐extractive human presence can strongly reshape reef predator distributions even where fishing pressure is limited. Integrating tourism intensity and coastal development into marine spatial planning is therefore essential for reef shark conservation, and combining ecological surveys with open‐source social and spatial datasets provides a scalable, low‐cost approach for assessing human disturbance in data‐limited reef systems.