Predicting coral dynamics through climate change

Woesik, Robert van; Köksal, Semen; Ünal, A.; Cacciapaglia, Chris; Randall, Carly J.

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-36169-7

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Most frequently, ordinary, autonomous differential equations (i.e. ODEs) are employed (Wolanski et al 2004, Riegl & Purkis 2009, Bas-kett et al 2010, Melbourne-Thomas et al 2011, van Woesik et al 2018.…”

Section: Differential and Difference Equation Models (Dems)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…DEMs or MPMs). While ODEs and DEs have been widely used in the analysis of coral cover (Mumby et al 2007, van Woesik et al 2018, only a few applications address coral size distributions (Sebens 1982, Riegl & Purkis 2009, Riegl et al 2013, Baskett et al 2014. The strengths of DEMs are their flexibility in allowing precise statements with regards to the population variables of interest.…”

Section: Differential and Difference Equation Models (Dems)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Urgent need for coral demography in a world where corals are disappearing

Edmunds

Riegl

2020

Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser.

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Coral reefs have long attracted attention because of their biological and economic importance, but this interest now has turned to examining the possibility of functional extirpation. Widespread declines in coral abundances have fueled the shift in motivation for studying reefs and catalyzed the proliferation of monitoring to record the changes underway. Despite appreciation of monitoring as a scientific endeavor, its primary use has continued to be the quantification of cover of coral, macroalgae, and a few other space holders. The limitations of coral cover in evaluating the consequences of changing coral abundance were highlighted decades ago. Yet neglect of the tools most appropriate for this task (demographic approaches) and continuing emphasis on a tool (coral cover) that is not ideal, indicates that these limitations are not widely appreciated. Reef monitoring therefore continues to underperform with respect to its potential, thus depriving scientists of the approaches necessary to project the fate of coral reefs and test hypotheses focused on the proximal causes of declining coral cover. We make the case that the coral reef crisis creates a need for coral demography that is more acute now than 4 decades ago. Modern demographic approaches are well suited to meet this need, but to realize their potential, consideration will need to be given to the possibility of expanding ecological monitoring of coral reefs to provide the data necessary for demographic analyses of their foundation taxon, the Scleractinia.

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Section: Differential and Difference Equation Models (Dems)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Differential and Difference Equation Models (Dems)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Urgent need for coral demography in a world where corals are disappearing

Edmunds

Riegl

2020

Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser.

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“…Specific reef recovery responses to past thermal exposure should ideally inform any prediction of future ecological responses to projected climate exposure (Donner and Carilli 2019). However, to date, studies by Ortiz et al (2014), Van Woesik et al (2018), and Wolff et al (2018 are unique examples of ecological responses to accumulated thermal stress (eg DHWs/DHMs) or monthly SST. These measures account for shorter term thermal extreme events causing coral bleaching and mortality, but cannot represent the effects of protective pre-bleaching exposure (Ainsworth et al 2016), diurnal SST variability (Safaie et al 2018), peak SST, thermal history, and duration of cool periods (McClanahan et al 2019).…”

Section: Linking Climate-change Exposure To Ecological Responses and Adaptive Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, these responses to multiple climatic disturbances are difficult to quantify because of the lack of long-term data and presence of multiple factors that affect coral reef sensitivity. Even though such detailed data collection is costly and time consuming, long-term datasets are increasingly needed to better understand the response of corals to climate stressors (Van Woesik et al 2018;Darling et al 2019;Donner and Carilli 2019).…”

Section: Linking Climate-change Exposure To Ecological Responses and Adaptive Capacitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Coral conservation requires ecological climate‐change vulnerability assessments

Dixon

Forster

Beger

2021

Frontiers in Ecol & Environ

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C limate-change impacts on tropical marine ecosystems are extensive and increasing in severity as global greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions continue to rise (Hughes et al. 2018). The decline of coral reef systems worldwide is of extreme concern due to the considerable economic and ecological value associated with the planet's most biodiverse marine ecosystem (Hughes et al. 2017a). Coral reef climate vulnerability refers to the predisposition of coral species, populations, and/or communities to be negatively affected by climate change, and encompasses three aspects: climate exposure, ecological sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (Dawson et al. 2011). Current management solutions generally focus on removing local threats from reefs that are least vulnerable to climate change (Beyer et al. 2018), and therefore global policy and regional or local reef management depend on robust estimates of spatiotemporal climate-change impacts on marine habitats. However, the diverse range of factors affecting ecological responses to multiple climatic changes complicates coral reef vulnerability assessment (Safaie et al. 2018), leading to uncertain or incorrect estimates that potentially compromise climate-change-resilient management strategies.Climate-relevant conservation for coral reefs requires global climate-change mitigation along with the establishment of marine protected areas that control local-scale threats and consequently reduce the combined impact of global-scale stressors (Tittensor et al. 2019). The dismal outlook for the future of coral reefs has forced conservation efforts into two general approaches: protect the least exposed areas (Beyer et al. 2018) or protect a range of areas subjected to varying exposure regimes (Webster et al. 2017). Identifying a range of areas minimizes uncertainty associated with ecological responses to historical warming and bleaching events (Mumby et al. 2011), and incorporates multiple habitat types subjected to varying levels of exploitation (Webster et al. 2017). However, climate conditions are projected to render large areas uninhabitable to corals, and -in light of limited conservation resources -protecting low climate exposure areas will be considered most efficient because they are more likely to survive (Beyer et al. 2018;Mcleod et al. 2019). This selective identification of the least-exposed sites can be successful only if exposure estimates prove to be correct (Webster et al. 2017) and if exposure is a valid predictor of reef vulnerability.

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“…Serious pollution emissions would lead to a reduction in biodiversity and increase in sediment and nutrient input, thereby increasing the risk of eutrophication in offshore waters and damaging marine ecosystems. Woesik, et al [18] found that when sudden, short-term climate oscillations occur, especially in the case of El Niño events, coral reef ecosystems are greatly damaged by exposure to abnormally high temperatures, and the resilience of coral reefs is also reduced due to the low cover of the damaged coral populations. Chin, et al [19] integrated regional and national report information and found that most coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean remain healthy as a whole, but, in some areas, coral reefs were suffering varying degrees of damage due to environmental and human factors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-Term Changes in the Land–Ocean Ecological Environment in Small Island Countries in the South Pacific: A Fiji Vision

Zhu

Bai

et al. 2021

Remote Sensing

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Small island countries in the South Pacific are ecologically fragile areas, vulnerable to climate change, and the long-term ecological changes in the sea and land have an important impact on their sustainable development. This study takes Fiji, a typical small island country in the South Pacific, as an example, to analyze the change and connection of marine and terrestrial ecosystem environments based on 30 years of multi-source, satellite, remote-sensing data. From 1991 to 2019, according to the change in forest area in Fiji, three stages were delineated: first was a period of stability, then a decrease, and then a recovery in recent years. From 1991 to 2002, Fiji’s vegetation accounted for 73% of the total area; sea environment surrounding the islands, such as sea level height and sea surface temperature, were relatively low, with high water transparency. From 2002 to 2014, with the development of forestry and tourism, vegetation decreased by 6.89% and bare land increased, which changes the runoff erosion in the drainage basin; correspondingly, the chlorophyll a concentration in three major estuaries was found to be slightly increased with low water transparency. Meanwhile, coupled with the rising sea temperature, the area of Fiji’s coral reefs shrank significantly, with 51.13% of the total loss of coral reefs occurring in the Vanua Levu, where bare land and runoff were more distributed in its drainage basin. From 2014 to 2019, Fiji’s vegetation and coral reef areas recovered from the former stage; affected by short-term climate oscillations such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the sea surface temperature showed a significant abnormal drop and the water transparency decreased. In the past 30 years (1993–2018), the sea level rise rate around Fiji reached 4 mm/year, and the temperature increased by 0.3 °C, which threatens the coastal ecosystem environment, including coral reefs and mangrove; inappropriate land-use change would worsen the situation in these ecologically fragile areas.

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Predicting coral dynamics through climate change

Cited by 16 publications

References 44 publications

Urgent need for coral demography in a world where corals are disappearing

Urgent need for coral demography in a world where corals are disappearing

Coral conservation requires ecological climate‐change vulnerability assessments

Long-Term Changes in the Land–Ocean Ecological Environment in Small Island Countries in the South Pacific: A Fiji Vision

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