A study on the recovery of Tobago's coral reefs following the 2010 mass bleaching event.
Summary (1 min read)
2.2.4 Statistical analysis
- All juvenile and sediment data were tested for normality using the Shapiro-‐Wilk test and homogeneity of variance using graphical methods.
- Sedimentation rate data were found to be normally distributed, although juvenile data did not follow a normal destruction.
2.3.1 Juvenile density and composition
- Broadcasting juvenile taxa represented the minority (27.1 %) such as Siderastrea, Diploria, Montastrea and Colpophyllia.
- The small-‐sized brooding Scolymia spp., had moderate abundances of juveniles, mainly at Culloden sites.
3.4 Discussion
- Many species experienced a decline in colony abundance; percent cover and mean colony size by 2011, symptomatic of corals having suffered complete mortality and/or partial mortality.
- This study indicates that across Tobago’s different reef sites, the bleaching disturbance can lead to a dominance of smaller size coral colonies, which could negatively affect the reproductive output.
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Cites background from "A study on the recovery of Tobago's..."
...in the Caribbean [25] and continued decline is expected as temperature stress increases [6, 26, 27], leading to a decline in reef complexity [28] Temperature Regimes Impact Coral Assemblages of Lagoonal Reefs...
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...A shift from dominance of competitive and generalist species to weedy and stress tolerant species occurred on Okinawan reefs following the 1998 El Niño bleaching event [29, 30] and an overall decline in coral cover and abundance currently occurring in the Caribbean has been coupled with an increase in abundance of weedy species [27, 31]....
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References
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"A study on the recovery of Tobago's..." refers methods in this paper
...Sediment compositionwas analyzed using the loss on ignition (LOI) method (Heiri et al., 2001) to determine what fraction of the sediment was composed of organic and carbonate matter; the remaining non-carbonate material represented the terrigenous fraction of the sample....
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"A study on the recovery of Tobago's..." refers background in this paper
...This ecological change has been attributed to the reduction of herbivory, due to overfishing and the regional die-off of grazing urchins in the 1980s, increased terrestrial runoff, marine pollution and possibly related disease outbreaks (Hughes, 1994; Jackson et al., 2014)....
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2,565 citations
"A study on the recovery of Tobago's..." refers methods in this paper
...The impact of the bleaching event on the coral community of each site over the three years was also analyzed using a non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarities of each species abundance per site, using vegan package version 2.0- 10 (Borcard et al., 2011)....
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