Tag: Coral Restoration and Resilience

High-resolution photomosaic images taken at Maug Island. Photo Credit: NOAA

Volcano Spewing Carbon Dioxide Drives Coral to Give Way to Algae

The new research published online August 10 in Nature Climate Change provides a stark look into the future of ocean acidification – the absorption by the global oceans of increasing amounts of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists predict that elevated carbon dioxide absorbed by the global oceans will drive similar ecosystem shifts, making it difficult for coral to build skeletons and easier for other plants and animals to erode them.

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Coral ecologist Ian Enochs dives in the carbon dioxide bubbles of Maug's coral reefs (credit: Stephani Gordon/Open Boat Films/NOAA)

Increased Erosion at Acidified Coral Reefs

Corals live and thrive by maintaining a careful balance between their growth rate and the rate of erosion. Scientists already know the projected increases in carbon dioxide in our global oceans, known as ocean acidification, will slow the rate at which corals build the hard calcium carbonate skeletons that are the foundation of their habitat. A new study published online today in PLOS ONE demonstrates that in naturally highly acidified waters, these coral skeletons will also face increased erosion from microscopic organisms, called bioerosion. The result is accelerated breakdown and loss of reef structures, and potentially the loss of essential habitat.

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Collecting Data at Cheeca Rocks

Coral Team Conducts Monitoring Activities at Cheeca Rocks

AOML coral researchers conducted a number of reef monitoring activities during the month of October at Cheeca Rocks off of Islamorada, Florida. Among the activities was the installation of new sensors to measure pH and photosynthetic light levels at the on-site MapCO2 buoy. The team also conducted benthic surveys and deployed a pH sensor at an inshore patch reef where they are conducting an experiment to examine the impacts of bleaching across Florida Keys reefs. They were also joined by a colleague from the University of Miami who conducted photo mosaic surveys of the reefs. A photo mosaic is a tool used by researchers to map reefscapes and involves the stitching together of hundreds of photos taken simultaneously across the reef to form one giant image. Photo mosaics provide coral researchers with an important tool to more accurately document community-wide changes in reef health.

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Map showing locations for the Coral Health and Monitoring Program.

New Virtual Stations Enhance Coral Monitoring Efforts in Caribbean

AOML’s Coral Health and Monitoring Program (CHAMP) rolled out a new data source in October as part of its online data query tool. Optimally Interpolated Sea Surface Temperatures, or OISSTs, are data from microwave satellite observation platforms, products that are sourced from Remote Sensing Systems. Whereas other sea surface temperature sources might be missing data due to orbital gaps or non-ideal environmental conditions such as cloud cover or rainfall, the OISST platform corrects for these errors to provide a complete, daily sea surface temperature map that can benefit coral health and monitoring efforts worldwide.

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Projected timing in years of the onset of annual severe bleaching for the Florida Reef Tract and the Bahamas at ~11 km resolution. Note that regions in red and orange, such as the Dry Tortugas, are projected to bleach annually starting in the early 2030s, while the more northern stretch of the Florida Keys near Biscayne Bay, are projected to bleach annually in the mid-2040s.

Study Provides Local-scale Projections of Coral Bleaching Over the Next 100 Years

In a new study published April 1 in Global Change Biology, NOAA oceanographers and colleagues have developed a new method to produce high-resolution projections of the range and onset of severe annual coral bleaching for reefs in the Gulf of America and Caribbean

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Bleached colony of Meandrina meandrites at Emerald Reef, Key Biscayne, FL. Image credit: NOAA

The Science Behind Coral Bleaching in the Florida Keys

2014 was a relatively warm summer in South Florida, and local divers noticed the effects of this sustained weather pattern. Below the ocean surface, corals were bleaching. In the month of August, the Coral Bleaching Early Warning Network, jointly supported by Mote Marine Lab and NOAA’s Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, received 34 reports describing paling or partial bleaching and an additional 19 reports indicating significant bleaching. Scientists continue to monitor the impact of this severe bleaching event to determine the extent of coral mortality.

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