International integration of management strategies that support reef resilience need to be vigorously implemented, and complemented by strong policy decisions to reduce the rate of global warming.
The distinctive geographic footprints of recurrent bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002 and 2016 were determined by the spatial pattern of sea temperatures in each year, suggesting that local protection of reefs affords little or no resistance to extreme heat.
A detailed analysis of the bleaching response of 4160 coral colonies, representing 45 genera and 15 families, from two depths at four sites on reefs fringing inshore islands on the Great Barrier Reef suggests that much of the spatial variation inBleaching response was due to assemblage composition and thermal acclimation.
Systematic and biogeographical patterns in the reproductive biology of the Scleractinia are explored within the context of a new molecular phylogeny and using reproductive traits from nearly 400 species, confirming that coral sexuality is highly conserved, and mode of larval development is relatively plastic.
Different physical and biological processes prevail at different scales. As a consequence, small-scale experiments or local observations provide limited insights into regional or global phenomena.…
It is predicted that large-scale patterns of recruitment could be driven by changes in the abundance of adults and/or their fecundity, i.e., that corals exhibit a stock-recruitment relationship, and implies that small, sublethal changes in fecundities of corals could result in major reductions in recruitment.
This study bridges the gap between the theory and practice of assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, under the emerging framework for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems, by rigorously defining both the initial and collapsed states, identifying the major driver of change, and establishing quantitative collapse thresholds.
Coral reefs in the present day have less time than in earlier periods to recover from bleaching events, and Tropical reef systems are transitioning to a new era in which the interval between recurrent bouts of coral bleaching is too short for a full recovery of mature assemblages.
It is shown that isolated reefs can recover from major disturbance, and that the benefits of their isolation from chronic anthropogenic pressures can outweigh the costs of limited connectivity.
Monitoring individual colonies of 4 common coral species for 8 mo following historically high sea-surface temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 to compare their response to, and recovery from, thermal stress and to examine the effect of bleaching on growth and reproduction in 2 Acropora species suggests recovery to former levels of abundance is likely to be slow.