Toward a New Era of Coral Reef Monitoring

Apprill, Amy; Girdhar, Yogesh; Mooney, T. Aran; Hansel, Colleen M.; Long, Matthew H.; Liu, Yaqin; Zhang, W Gordon; Kapit, Jason; Hughen, Konrad A; Coogan, Jeff; Greene, Austin

doi:10.1021/acs.est.2c05369

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 60 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, in recent decades, reef-building corals and associated biodiversity have experienced a dramatic and unprecedented decline, reducing their contributions to these communities by half (Eddy et al, 2021). The need to study and monitor reef health using non-invasive and scalable tools has led to the development of diverse monitoring techniques (Apprill et al, 2023), such as eDNA (West et al, 2020), remote-sensing (Mumby et al, 2004;Liu et al, 2005), visual imaging and surveys (Mallet and Pelletier, 2014), and passive acoustics (Kaplan et al, 2015;Mooney et al, 2020;Lamont et al, 2022a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unidentified fish sounds as indicators of coral reef health and comparison to other acoustic methods

Jarriel,

Formel,

Ferguson

et al. 2024

Front. Remote Sens.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The global decline of coral reefs is a major contributor to the global biodiversity crisis and requires improved monitoring at these critically important habitats. Non-invasive passive acoustic assessments may address this need, leveraging the rich variety and spatiotemporal variability of biological sounds present in coral reef environments and offering near-continuous temporal coverage. Despite this, acoustic metrics that reliably represent coral reef health are still debated, and ground-truthing of methods is limited. Here we investigated how the prevalence of low frequency biotic sounds (without species information) relates to coral reef health, providing a foundation from which one can compare assessment methods. We first quantified call rates of these low frequency sounds for three reefs exhibiting different community assemblages around St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, by manually annotating presumed fish noises for 1 min every 30 min across 8 days for each site. Annotated days were selected at key points across lunar cycles. These call rates were then compared with traditional visual surveys, and several acoustic methods and indices commonly used in underwater soundscape research. We found that, overall, manually detected fish call rates successfully differentiated between the three reefs, capturing variation in crepuscular activity levels–a pattern consistent with previous work that highlights the importance of diel choruses. Moreover, fish vocal rates were predictors of hard coral cover, fish abundance, and fish species richness, while most acoustic indices failed to parse out fine distinctions among the three sites. Some, such as the Acoustic Complexity Index, failed to reveal any expected differences between sites or times of day, while the Bioacoustic Index could only identify the most acoustically active reef, otherwise having weak correlations to visual metrics. Of the indices tested, root-mean-squared sound pressure level and Acoustic Entropy, both calculated in the low frequency fish band (50–1,200 Hz), showed the strongest association with visual health measures. These findings present an important step toward using soundscape cues for reef health assessments. The limited generalizability of acoustic indices across different locations emphasizes the need for caution in their application. Therefore, it is crucial to improve methods utilizing fish sounds, such as automatic fish call detectors that are able to generalize well to new soundscapes.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unidentified fish sounds as indicators of coral reef health and comparison to other acoustic methods

Jarriel,

Formel,

Ferguson

et al. 2024

Front. Remote Sens.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…New monitoring approaches can help survey coral reefs and improve the understanding of their responses to climate change (Apprill et al, 2023). Yadav et al used structure-from-motion photogrammetry to track spatial changes in community composition, coral bleaching, and mortality during a marine heatwave 2019 in Kane'ohe Bay, Hawaii.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial: Innovative approaches to coral reef science by early career researchers

Paz-García,

Armstrong,

Popovic

et al. 2023

Front. Mar. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Editorial on the Research TopicInnovative approaches to coral reef science by early career researchers Coral reefs are facing numerous threats including climate change, ocean acidification, coastal development, pollution, overfishing, coral disease, and other disturbances (Bellwood et al., 2004;Setter et al., 2022). Improving the understanding of these ecosystems to help stem their decline requires the integration of innovative technologies. This Research Topic aims to showcase and acknowledge high-quality work from outstanding researchers in the early stages of their careers, particularly of those who obtained their Masters or PhD within the last 10 years from a wide range of fields in coral reef science. This Research Topic highlights the novel and transformative work of 14 contributions conducted by early career scientists from institutions across the globe and provides a forum for the development of the emerging technologies and the integration of these methods to address questions in coral reef ecosystems (Figure 1). The articles implement innovative approaches for reef monitoring and intervention to aid the recovery of coral reefs. They also explore new methods and models to detect and understand coral reef stressors, such as thermal and light stress, acidic water, and microplastics. In addition, different methods are used to investigate trophic strategies in mesophotic reefs, characterize sexual dimorphism, and delineate species using three-dimensional skeletal features. Innovative approaches in reef monitoringInteractions between macroalgae and other benthic taxa can result in changes in community composition (Brown et al., 2018), whereby dominant taxa outcompete other species in reef ecosystems. Grady et al. present an example of how molecular genetics and scanning electron microscopy can be paired with ecological monitoring to document coral reef ecosystem change and benthic community composition reshuffling. The authors analyzed long-term ecological data (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020) on the western coast of Hawaii, Frontiers in Marine Science frontiersin.org 01

show abstract

Time series (2003–15) analysis of selected physicochemical parameters in Indian Ocean: Cumulative impacts prediction on coral bleaching using machine learning

Panja,

Jaiswal,

Haldar

2024

Science of The Total Environment

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Toward a New Era of Coral Reef Monitoring

Cited by 8 publications

References 60 publications

Unidentified fish sounds as indicators of coral reef health and comparison to other acoustic methods

Unidentified fish sounds as indicators of coral reef health and comparison to other acoustic methods

Editorial: Innovative approaches to coral reef science by early career researchers

Time series (2003–15) analysis of selected physicochemical parameters in Indian Ocean: Cumulative impacts prediction on coral bleaching using machine learning

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About