Skeletal records of bleaching reveal different thermal thresholds of Pacific coral reef assemblages

Autor: Hannah C. Barkley, Hanny E. Rivera, Sangeeta Mangubhai, Russell E. Brainard, Nathaniel R. Mollica, Elizabeth J. Drenkard, Charles W. Young, Andrew R. Solow, Pat Lohmann, Alice E. Alpert, Kathryn R. Pietro, Jessica Carilli, Celina Scott-Buechler, Thomas M. DeCarlo, Randi D. Rotjan, Anne L. Cohen
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Coral Reefs. 38:743-757
ISSN: 1432-0975
0722-4028
DOI: 10.1007/s00338-019-01803-x
Popis: Ocean warming is negatively impacting coral reef ecosystems and considerable effort is currently invested in projecting coral reef futures under 21st century climate change. A limiting factor in these projections is lack of quantitative data on the thermal thresholds of different reef communities, due in large part to spatial and temporal gaps in bleaching observations. Here we apply a coral bleaching proxy, skeletal stress bands, to reconstruct the history of bleaching on eight coral reefs in the central equatorial Pacific (CEP) and use this information to constrain the thermal thresholds of their coral communities. First, three genera of massive corals collected on both Pacific and Caribbean reefs are used to derive a calibration between the proportion of corals that form stress bands during a bleaching event, and the total observed bleaching incidence in the community of mixed coral taxa. The correlation is highly significant, indicating that stress bands in massive corals reflect community-level bleaching severity (R2 = 0.945, p
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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