Cory Walter

TL;DR: Comparison of satellite data against field surveys demonstrated a significant predictive relationship between accumulated heat stress (measured using NOAA Coral Reef Watch's Degree Heating Weeks) and bleaching intensity.

TL;DR: An extensive dataset collected by restoration practitioners is combined to document early restoration success metrics in Florida and Puerto Rico, USA and provides the basis for a stop-light indicator framework for new or existing restoration programs to evaluate their performance.

TL;DR: The location of the coral nurseries at deeper habitats and distanced from shallow nearshore habitats that experienced extreme temperature conditions buffered the impacts of the cold-water event and preserved essential local genotypes for future Acropora restoration activities.

TL;DR: The observations reported here indicate that sponge–Symbiodinium symbioses can be destabilized by environmental stressors in a manner similar to corals, troubling given increasing intensity and frequency of warming events, the abundance of sponges in reef ecosystems, and the essential ecological role they play in coral reef productivity.

TL;DR: In this article, a stepwise multiple linear regression was used to identify the environmental factors contributing to bleaching of Florida reef tract corals, and the results showed that elevated sea surface temperature (SST) and high visible light levels reaching the benthos (VLI) each independently contributed to coral bleaching.