Coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching pdf file

Resilience assessment of coral reefs reef resilience. The great barrier reef is the worlds largest coral reef, stretching 2,300km from papua new guinea to the coast of queensland, australia. Herbivory boosts the resilience of coral assemblages to global warming. Marked annual coral bleaching resilience of an inshore patch. Coral bleaching, during which corals lose their symbiotic dinoflagellates, typically corresponds with periods of intense heat stress, and appears to be increasing in frequency and geographic extent as the climate warms. Local stressors reduce coral resilience to bleaching europe. In tandem with the changes in macroalgae and corallines, the trajectory of coral reassembly after the 1998 bleaching event diverged markedly in the fishexclusion cages. A resilient coral reef is one that can either resist a largescale stressful event, such as bleaching, or recover from it.

Bleaching of coral reefs reduced where daily temperature. National academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine. Responding to climate change for reef managers reef managers guide. Assessing relative resilience potential of coral reefs to.

Coral stress response plan for the coral and marine. Resilience concepts and their application to coral reefs. The reef resilience network connects marine resource managers with information, experts, resources, and skillbuilding opportunities to accelerate and leverage solutions for improved conservation and restoration of coral reefs and reef fisheries around the world. A guide to assessing coral reef resilience for decision support coral reefs are losing their resilience. Coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching iucn portals. Building coral reef resilience through assisted evolution pnas. Warming trends and bleaching stress of the worlds coral.

The following seven indicators are included in the assessment of relative resilience. Ingredients of reef resilience understanding the characteristics and processes that support coral resilience is the key to managing coral reefs in a period of global change. It is unlikely that direct human impacts are involved as the inshore sites are closest to human population centers and landbased. Climate change is the greatest global threat to coral reef ecosystems. As a union, iucn seeks to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources. Most reef resilience assessments today are targeting one parameter in particular. Coral bleaching in the red sea is more common in the northern section of the reefs, the southern part of the reef has been plagued by coral eating starfish, dynamite fishing and human impacts on the environment. In both the 1998 and 2002 events, the vast majority of corals on the reef survived, as sea temperatures came back down again in time for them to recover. This paper synthesises much of the current scientific knowledge on coral reef resistance and resilience to bleaching, a possible major effect of climate change. Bleaching and recovery patterns of corals in palk bay, india.

Coral stress response plan for the coral and marine aquarium fish fisheries may 2009 coral stress response plan for the coral and marine aquarium fish fisheries may 2009 3 figure 1. Implications for coral reef conservation and management article pdf available in conservation biology 174. Your resilience assessment will involve measuring or assessing ecological factors that contribute to resistance and recovery e. Coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching gabriel d. Mechanisms of reef coral resistance to future climate change. The following indicators are included in the assessment of relative resilience potential. Assisted evolution approaches to build coral reef resilience the management and conservation of coral reefs has focused exclusively on the preservation of natural biodiversity, and any proposals to use corals enhanced via assisted evolution to promote resilience is a radical departure from this approach and thus likely to be controversial and. Iucn working group on climate change and coral reefs. Coral reefs are subjected globally to a variety of natural and anthropogenic stressors that often act synergistically. The resilience of coral reefs is the biological ability of coral reefs to recover from natural disturbances such as storms and bleaching episodes. Author summary australias great barrier reef is a large coral ecosystem consisting of more than 3,800 reefs. The four main ingredients for coral resilience are.

Define coral reef resilience as a two part process of resistance and recovery involves both engineering and ecological resilience note that a recent publication by mumby et al 2014 also discusses these two forms of resilience. Local conservation actions can significantly boost corals resilience to, and recovery from, climateinduced thermal bleaching by reducing other. Four conditions determine the outcome of stressful temperatures for coral reefsbleaching resistance, coral tolerance, reef recovery and human adaptive capacity. Connectivity and systemic resilience of the great barrier reef. Resilience in carbonate production despite three coral. We develop a framework of resiliencerelated concepts and describe their methodological approaches. A users manual for building resistance and resilience to climate change. Resilience assessment of coral reefs assessment protocol for coral reefs, focusing on coral bleaching and thermal stress.

Efforts to promote reef resilience are yielding powerful results. Socioeconomic impacts of coral bleaching and related mortality degraded coral reefs are less able to provide the ecosystem services on which local human communities depend. Britt, is it possible for a coral reef to recover from a stressful event maybe coral bleaching like we talked about or one of the others from your first response. A decision framework for interventions to increase the. In maui, the community came together to protect herbivorous fish that eat algae and control its growth on the reef. Scientific knowledge can inform and guide the requisite. Implications for coral reef conservation and management conservation biology 17, 956967 2003. Today, reversing ongoing and future coral reef degradation presents significant challenges and countering this negative trend will take considerable efforts and investments. Coral reef resilience and resistance to blaeaching docshare. Work is needed to increase the application of reef resilience theories and develop innovative.

Coral reef resilience to climate change in the florida reef tract. To test our hypothesis that chronic local stress reduces coral resistance and resilience to bleaching, we focus on coral growth before and after the 1998 massbleaching event from four sites on the mesoamerican reef fig. This is an important finding that suggests that focusing on conserving or propagating corals that are resilient with regard to just one trait, like bleaching resistance, could result in the loss of diversity in disease resistance traits that could play a key role in coral reef persistence in the coming decades and centuries. Maynard j, byrne j, kerrigan k, tracey d, bohnsack k, pagan f, walczak j, and williams gj. Coral reef resilience to crown of thorns starfish and coral. The concept of resilience is long established across a widerange of disciplines, but its evaluation in many ecosystems has been challenging due to the complexities involved in quantifying a somewhat abstract dynamical phenomenon. Coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching citeseerx. Local interventions boost corals resilience to bleaching.

Coral reef bleaching is stark evidence of the damage being inflicted by global climate change on marine ecosystems, but a research team has found some cause for hope. Local stressors reduce coral resilience to bleaching. Bleached sinularia australia paul marshall, gbrmpa 3. Bleaching causes loss of disease resistance within the. For example, degraded reefs are less productive and may not be able to sustain accretion rates necessary to ensure reefs continue to provide shoreline protection services. Phase shifts, herbivory, and the resilience of coral reefs to.

A guide to assessing coral reef resilience for decision support. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. There would need to be an increase in bleaching resilience or resistance of this community to persist with bleaching every year for more than. This is the official manual 2009 edition of the reef resilience assessment protocol developed by the. Many different stressors can cause coral bleaching, including freshwater inundation and poor water quality from runoff, however heat stress from aboveaverage temperatures is the only known cause of mass coral bleaching. A fundamental question in coral reef ecology is whether chronic local stress reduces coral resistance and resilience from episodic stress such as bleaching, or. Recent advances in understanding coral resilience are.

Modelling regional connectivity patterns reveals reefs that can act as prominent larval sources and supply larvae to other coral populations in the area. This was the largest coral bleaching event on the reef on record prior to 2016. Actions for managers enhancing reef resilience reduce bleaching reducelight stress coolreefs, increase mixing increase survival improvewater quality reducedisease prevalence aid recovery coral fragmentation encouragerecruitment. Mass bleaching also occurred on the reef in 2002, with 60 per cent of reefs affected. Managers can take active steps toward restoring and maintaining the longterm resilience of coral reef ecosystems. As a tool for identifying reef areas that are likely to be most robust in the face of continuing climate change and for determining priority areas for. Iucn global marine programme, the world conservation union iucn, rue mauverney 28, 1196 gland, switzerland. As temperatures rise, mass coral bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent.

Ideally, global action to reduce emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will be. Frequency and severity of coral bleaching events increased in recent years affecting the recovery and resilience of corals. Roche et al, towards developing a mechanistic understanding of coral reef resilience to thermal stress across multiple scales, current climate change reports 2018. Over the past two decades, the great barrier reef has seen four mass bleaching events, most recently in 2016 and 2017. Coral bleaching is primarily caused by prolonged exposure to high sea temperatures. In this study, influence of bleaching and recovery patterns of corals on the resilience potential of palk bay reef was assessed over. Frontiers scientific frontiers in the management of coral. Resilience refers to the ability of biological or social systems to overcome pressures and stresses by maintaining key functions through resisting or adapting to change. Today, an estimated 20% of coral reefs worldwide have been destroyed, while 24% are in imminent danger and a further 26% are under longer term danger of collapse wilkinson, 2004. Pdf coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching.

Climate change and ocean acidificationwhich can result in coral bleaching events, slower growth and reproduction rates, and degraded reef structureare the most pressing global threats to coral reefs. Unfortunately, coral reefs are also among the most. This guide presents a 10step process for completing a resilience assessment, putting into managers hands the means to assess, map and monitor coral reef resilience, and the means to identify and prioritize actions that support resilience in the face of climate change. Article pdf available in science 3446186 april 2014 with 820 reads how we measure reads. Reefscape with pink soft corals, schooling orange anthias and the silhouette of a diver in the background egypt mary l frost 2. As a union, iucn seeks to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable. Grimsditch and others published coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching find, read and cite all the research you need on researchgate. Reefbuilding corals and other organisms have symbiotic relationships with singlecelled photosynthetic algae dinoflagellates, known as zooxanthellae other similar symbionts occur in sponges and other organisms. It is possible for a coral to recover, and in fact its also possible in some cases for them to resist the event and not bleach or not bleach as badly. The website of the working group at iucn holds a range of publications on coral reef, seagrass, mangrove and social resilience to climate change.

The higher coral cover on the inshore reefs has been hypothesized to be due to increased resistance andor resilience of local corals to elevated temperatures and bleaching kenkel et al. Analysis of global coral bleaching literature dlnr. Although the development of gmo corals might be contemplated in extremis at a future time, we advocate less drastic approaches discussed in assisted evolution approaches to build coral reef resilience that use widely accepted techniques to accelerate naturally occurring evolutionary processes e. Although the early coral reef bleaching warning system noaausa is established, there is no feasible treatment that can minimize temperature bleaching andor disease impacts on corals in the field. Coral populations inhabiting these reefs are connected by larvae that are dispersed by ocean currents. Coral reef resilience and resistance to bleaching pipap. If this reef loses 2% coral cover per year under an annual bleaching scenario, then all coral would be lost by attrition in roughly yr at the coverage levels in 2016 25. Assessing coral reef resilience a primary output of the iucncccr was a general method for measuring resilience of coral reefs, to which cordios experience in coral reef monitoring contributed.