The relationship between macroalgae taxa and human disturbance on central Pacific coral reefs
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This article examined differences in coral and algal community compositions and their response to human disturbance and past heat stress, by analyzing 25 sites along a gradient of human disturbance in Majuro and Arno Atolls of the Republic of the Marshall Islands.About:
This article is published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.The article was published on 2019-05-24 and is currently open access. It has received 11 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Reef & Atoll.read more
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Coral reefs in the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati: Resistance, resilience, and recovery after more than a decade of multiple stressors.
Abstract: Coral reefs are increasingly affected by a combination of acute and chronic disturbances from climate change and local stressors. The coral reefs of the Republic of Kiribati’s Gilbert Islands are exposed to frequent heat stress caused by central-Pacific type El Nino events, and may provide a glimpse into the future of coral reefs in other parts of the world, where the frequency of heat stress events will likely increase due to climate change. Reefs in the Gilbert Islands experienced a series of acute disturbances over the past fifteen years, including mass coral bleaching in 2004–2005 and 2009–2010, and an outbreak of the corallivorous sea star Acanthaster cf solaris, or Crown-of-Thorns (CoTs), in 2014. The local chronic pressures including nutrient loading, sedimentation and fishing vary within the island chain, with highest pressures on the reefs in urbanized South Tarawa Atoll. In this study, we examine how recovery from acute disturbances differs across a gradient of human influence in neighboring Tarawa and Abaiang Atolls from 2012 through 2018. Benthic cover and size frequency data suggests that local coral communities have adjusted to the heat stress via shifts in the community composition to more temperature-tolerant taxa and individuals. In densely populated South Tarawa, we document a phase shift to the weedy and less bleaching-sensitive coral Porites rus, which accounted for 81% of all coral cover by 2018. By contrast, in less populated Abaiang, coral communities remained comparatively more diverse (with higher percentages of Pocillopora and the octocoral Heliopora) after the disturbances, but reefs had lower overall hard coral cover (18%) and were dominated by turf algae (41%). The CoTs outbreak caused a decline in the cover and mean size of massive Porites, the only taxa that was a ‘winner’ of the coral bleaching events in Abaiang. Although there are signs of recovery, the long-term trajectory of the benthic communities in Abaiang is not yet clear. We suggest three scenarios: they may remain in their current state (dominated by turf algae), undergo a phase shift to dominance by the macroalgae Halimeda, or recover to dominance by thermally tolerant hard coral genera. These findings provide a rare glimpse at the future of coral reefs around the world and the ways they may be affected by climate change, which may allow scientists to better predict how other reefs will respond to increasing heat stress events across gradients of local human disturbance.
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Defining variation in pre-human ecosystems can guide conservation: An example from a Caribbean coral reef.
Aaron O'Dea,Mauro L. Lepore,Andrew H. Altieri,Andrew H. Altieri,Melisa Chan,Jorge Manuel Morales-Saldaña,Nicte-Ha Muñoz,John M. Pandolfi,Marguerite A. Toscano,Jian-xin Zhao,Erin M. Dillon,Erin M. Dillon +11 more
TL;DR: It is found that most coral communities today fall outside the Historical Range of Variation (HRV), identifying them as novel ecosystems and corroborating the well-documented transition from acroporid-dominated Caribbean reefs to reefs dominated by stress-tolerant taxa.
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Local human impacts disrupt relationships between benthic reef assemblages and environmental predictors
Amanda K. Ford,Jean-Baptiste Jouffray,Jean-Baptiste Jouffray,Albert V. Norström,Bradley R. Moore,Bradley R. Moore,Maggy M. Nugues,Gareth J. Williams,Sonia Bejarano,Franck Magron,Christian Wild,Sebastian C. A. Ferse +11 more
TL;DR: In this article, the influence of contrasting levels of local human impact using a spatially extensive dataset spanning 62 outer reefs around inhabited Pacific islands was investigated, showing that local human impacts fundamentally alter relationships between ecological communities and environmental drivers.
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Spatial distribution of benthic algae in the South China Sea: Responses to gradually changing environmental factors and ecological impacts on coral communities
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Ecosystem Service Response to Human Disturbance in the Yangtze River Economic Belt: A Case of Western Hunan, China
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors investigated the relationship between human disturbance and the ecosystem service value (ESV) change and found that more than 90% of intense human disturbance was distributed in the area of the lowest topographic gradient where topographic features were low-altitude and low-slope.
References
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TL;DR: Experimentally manipulated the density of large herbivorous fishes to test their influence on the resilience of coral assemblages in the aftermath of regional-scale bleaching in 1998, the largest coral mortality event recorded to date.