Over the past 3 decades, thermal stress events have damaged corals globally. Few studies, however, have tracked the recovery process or assessed whether winners in the short term are also winners in the long term. In the present study, we repeatedly sampled a coral assemblage over a 14 yr period, from 1997 to 2010, through 2 thermal stress events (in 1998 and 2001). Our goal was to examine the consistency of short-term winner and loser outcomes over the recovery period. Although species richness had recovered after 10 yr, the reef composition had changed, and few pocilloporids were to be found. The short-term winners were the thermally tolerant encrusting and massive coral morphologies (Porites and faviids) and Acropora colonies < 5 cm in diameter. Long-term winners were revealed as (1) thermally tolerant, locally persistent colonies, (2) remnant survivors that rapidly regrew, and (3) regionally persistent colonies that recruited. KEY WORDS: Coral bleaching · Climate adaptation · Temperature · Reefs · RecoveryResale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher Mar Ecol Prog Ser 434: 67-76, 2011 enced anomalous temperatures only every 50 to 60 yr (Thompson & van Woesik 2009). For example, the southern islands of Japan, the Great Barrier Reef and Micronesia all historically show low-frequency return periods (~50 yr), whereas the Galapagos Islands and Kiribati historically show high-frequency return periods (~5 yr) (Thompson & van Woesik 2009). Not only are contemporary worldwide patterns in thermal anomalies similar to those in the past, but the localities that have shown high-frequency return periods in the past few centuries have also recently experienced the most severe thermal stress (Thompson & van Woesik 2009). If these patterns persist into the near future, then some localities will receive both more intensive and more frequent thermal stress than other localities.Short-term studies suggest that some coral species are destined to become the 'winners', whereas others are destined to become the 'losers' (Loya et al. 2001). However, simply tolerating local thermal stress is not the only viable life-history strategy to persist through time. Ephemeral assemblages that are usually susceptible to local stress also survive regionally by being highly fecund and growing quickly (MacArthur & Wilson 1967, Loya 1976, Gates & Edmunds 1999. Regional persistence also depends on (1) the local survival of small fragments, which have an inherent capacity for regrowth, (2) whether corals on neighboring reefs survived through the thermal stress, (3) whether those neighboring corals have the capacity to supply recruits, (4) the survival of recruits from neighboring reefs, and (5) the return frequency and intensity of the thermal stresses.Few studies have examined the longterm recovery of coral assemblages following thermal stress. Here, we ask whether a winning species in the short term is also a winner in the long term. Previously we reported on the shortterm effects of a severe thermal s...

Ecosystem monitoring is central to effective management, where rapid reporting is essential to provide timely advice. While digital imagery has greatly improved the speed of underwater data collection for monitoring benthic communities, image analysis remains a bottleneck in reporting observations. In recent years, a rapid evolution of artificial intelligence in image recognition has been evident in its broad applications in modern society, offering new opportunities for increasing the capabilities of coral reef monitoring. Here, we evaluated the performance of Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for automated image analysis, using a global coral reef monitoring dataset. The study demonstrates the advantages of automated image analysis for coral reef monitoring in terms of error and repeatability of benthic abundance estimations, as well as cost and benefit. We found unbiased and high agreement between expert and automated observations (97%). Repeated surveys and comparisons against existing monitoring programs also show that automated estimation of benthic composition is equally robust in detecting change and ensuring the continuity of existing monitoring data. Using this automated approach, data analysis and reporting can be accelerated by at least 200x and at a fraction of the cost (1%). Combining commonly used underwater imagery in monitoring with automated image annotation can dramatically improve how we measure and monitor coral reefs worldwide, particularly in terms of allocating limited resources, rapid reporting and data integration within and across management areas.

Ecological measurements in marine settings are often constrained in space and time, with spatial heterogeneity obscuring broader generalisations. While advances in remote sensing, integrative modelling and meta-analysis enable generalisations from field observations, there is an underlying need for high-resolution, standardised and geo-referenced field data. Here, we evaluate a new approach aimed at optimising data collection and analysis to assess broad-scale patterns of coral reef community composition using automatically annotated underwater imagery, captured along 2 km transects. We validate this approach by investigating its ability to detect spatial (e.g., across regions) and temporal (e.g., over years) change, and by comparing automated annotation errors to those of multiple human annotators. Our results indicate that change of coral reef benthos can be captured at high resolution both spatially and temporally, with an average error below 5%, among key benthic groups. Cover estimation errors using automated annotation varied between 2% and 12%, slightly larger than human errors (which varied between 1% and 7%), but small enough to detect significant changes among dominant groups. Overall, this approach allows a rapid collection of in-situ observations at larger spatial scales (km) than previously possible, and provides a pathway to link, calibrate, and validate broader analyses across even larger spatial scales (10-10,000 km 2 ).