Is coral richness related to community resistance to and recovery from disturbance?

Abstract

More diverse communities are thought to be more stable—the diversity–stability hypothesis—due to increased resistance to and recovery from disturbances. For example, high diversity can make the presence of resilient or fast growing species and key facilitations among species more likely. How natural, geographic biodiversity patterns and changes in biodiversity due to human activities mediate community-level disturbance dynamics is largely unknown, especially in diverse systems. For example, few studies have explored the role of diversity in tropical marine communities, especially at large scales. We tested the diversity–stability hypothesis by asking whether coral richness is related to resistance to and recovery from disturbances including storms, predator outbreaks, and coral bleaching on tropical coral reefs. We synthesized the results of 41 field studies conducted on 82 reefs, documenting changes in coral cover due to disturbance, across a global gradient of coral richness. Our results indicate that coral reefs in more species-rich regions were marginally less resistant to disturbance and did not recover more quickly. Coral community resistance was also highly dependent on pre-disturbance coral cover, probably due in part to the sensitivity of fast-growing and often dominant plating acroporid corals to disturbance. Our results suggest that coral communities in biodiverse regions, such as the western Pacific, may not be more resistant and resilient to natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Further analyses controlling for disturbance intensity and other drivers of coral loss and recovery could improve our understanding of the influence of diversity on community stability in coral reef ecosystems.

Trophic compensation reinforces resistance: herbivory absorbs the increasing effects of multiple disturbances

“…; Zhang et al . ). In this framework, compensation to species loss occurs when there is no overall change to community biomass of species (i.e.…”

Three decades of degradation lead to diminished impacts of severe hurricanes on Caribbean reefs

“…, Zhang et al. ), and around St. John, multiple disturbances have created communities that generally are depleted of corals and are, indeed, resistant to storms (Gross and Edmunds ). Within the time frame examined herein, the data are sparse for a test of the effects of initial coral cover on subsequent losses, but the data available suggest such a relationship is absent at Tektite and PRS (Appendix : Fig.…”

The demography of hurricane effects on two coral populations differing in dynamics

“…Leading reasons for the limited underwater effects of Hurricanes Irma and Maria on coral reefs is that colonies of more delicate scleractinians had already been killed prior to September 2017 (Zhang et al. ), allowing these reefs to acquire resilience through adversity and the low coral abundance that it favors (Edmunds ). Regardless of the causes of this resilience, statistical power in detecting changes in low coral cover (i.e., for rare organism) is likely to be low in time‐series analyses that were designed for coral‐dominated reefs (i.e., where coral is common; e.g., Cunningham and Lindenmayer ).…”

“…(Zhang et al. ), and they reveal the complex implications of managing coral reefs for high resilience (Bellwood et al. , Darling and Côté ).…”