The mass coral bleaching event of inshore corals form South China Sea witnessed in 2020: insight into the causes, process and consequence

Coastal Upwelling Under Anthropogenic Influence Drives the Community Change, Assembly Process, and Co‐Occurrence Pattern of Coral Associated Microorganisms

“…There used to be abundant coral reefs in the shallow water along the coast of the Hainan Island, but >50% of the reefs have been destroyed by human activities since the 1970s (Hughes et al., 2013). In July 2020, the northwest coast of the Hainan Island was affected by a large‐scale bleaching event caused by the heat wave of the South China Sea, but the east coast of the Hainan Island did not experience severe coral bleaching thanks to QDU (Lyu et al., 2022; Zhu et al., 2022b). While the northwest and the east coast of the Hainan Island have the same latitude, their bleaching severity was 58.4% and 1.26% respectively (Lyu et al., 2022; Zhu et al., 2022b).…”

The impact of coastal upwelling on coral reef ecosystem under anthropogenic influence: Coral reef community and its response to environmental factors

“…Unfortunately, human activities including overfishing, land reclamation, coral mining, and aquaculture expansion contributed to the long-term coral degradation in Hainan Island [Figure 1C; (Huang et al, 2021)]. In the year of 2020, there was few coral bleaching events (1.26%) in the QDU zone, whereas average bleaching percentage was 58.4% for the coastal waters of the northwestern Hainan Island [Figure 1D; (Zhu et al, 2021;Lyu et al, 2022)]. In this work, we surveyed the coral reefs in 2021 from July to September at 20 representative sampling stations (Supplementary Table 1).…”

“…Live reef coral coverage at fixed stations in the west (non-upwelling stations) and east (upwelling stations) of Hainan Academy of Ocean and Fisheries Sciences (C), and data was described in a previous study by Huang et al (2021). The bleaching percentage of northwest coastal areas compared with that of eastern Hainan Island in 2020 (D), and the results were from Zhu et al (2021) and Lyu et al (2022).…”

“…Based on highresolution SST, we uncovered a pronounced temperature disparity between the eastern and western coast of Hainan Island. For comparison, a large-scale coral bleaching incident occurred in the northwestern zone of the Hainan Island but little in a coastal upwelling zone at the eastern coast where cool water may alleviate heating in 2020 (Zhu et al, 2021;Lyu et al, 2022). Frequency and intensity of coral bleaching events that was associated with anthropogenic global warming have significantly increased (Hughes et al, 2017), but fringing reefs at the east coast whereas they are located in within the reach of summer upwelling benefited from colder waters than northwest reefs in the non-upwelling zone.…”

“…The upwelling zone is mainly off the east coast of the Hainan Island and is generally centered in the nearby coastal waters at 18.5°-20.5°N and 110.0°-111.5°E from June to September (Lu et al, 2021). Large-scale coral bleaching in summer of 2020 is the most severe bleaching event reported in China within recent years, western Hainan Island incurred more severe bleaching than QDU (Zhu et al, 2021;Lyu et al, 2022). The QDU zone has the potential to mitigate the effects of harmful heat stress and may serve as a potential thermal refugia for climate change.…”