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Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment
Coral reefs face an uncertain future punctuated by recurring climate-induced disturbances. Understanding how reefs can recover from and reassemble after mass bleaching events is therefore important to predict their responses and persistence in a rapidly changing ocean. On naturally extreme reefs cha...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10506583/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37727686 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15987 |
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author | Speelman, P. Elias Parger, Michael Schoepf, Verena |
author_facet | Speelman, P. Elias Parger, Michael Schoepf, Verena |
author_sort | Speelman, P. Elias |
collection | PubMed |
description | Coral reefs face an uncertain future punctuated by recurring climate-induced disturbances. Understanding how reefs can recover from and reassemble after mass bleaching events is therefore important to predict their responses and persistence in a rapidly changing ocean. On naturally extreme reefs characterized by strong daily temperature variability, coral heat tolerance can vary significantly over small spatial gradients but it remains poorly understood how this impacts bleaching resilience and recovery dynamics, despite their importance as resilience hotspots and potential refugia. In the macrotidal Kimberley region in NW Australia, the 2016 global mass bleaching event had a strong habitat-specific impact on intertidal and subtidal coral communities at our study site: corals in the thermally variable intertidal bleached less severely and recovered within six months, while 68% of corals in the moderately variable subtidal died. We therefore conducted benthic surveys 3.5 years after the bleaching event to determine potential changes in benthic cover and coral community composition. In the subtidal, we documented substantial increases in algal cover and live coral cover had not fully recovered to pre-bleaching levels. Furthermore, the subtidal coral community shifted from being dominated by branching Acropora corals with a competitive life history strategy to opportunistic, weedy Pocillopora corals which likely has implications for the functioning and stress resilience of this novel coral community. In contrast, no shifts in algal and live coral cover or coral community composition occurred in the intertidal. These findings demonstrate that differences in coral heat tolerance across small spatial scales can have large consequences for bleaching resilience and that spatial patchiness in recovery trajectories and community reassembly after bleaching might be a common feature on thermally variable reefs. Our findings further confirm that reefs adapted to high daily temperature variability play a key role as resilience hotspots under current climate conditions, but their ability to do so may be limited under intensifying ocean warming. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10506583 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-105065832023-09-19 Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment Speelman, P. Elias Parger, Michael Schoepf, Verena PeerJ Conservation Biology Coral reefs face an uncertain future punctuated by recurring climate-induced disturbances. Understanding how reefs can recover from and reassemble after mass bleaching events is therefore important to predict their responses and persistence in a rapidly changing ocean. On naturally extreme reefs characterized by strong daily temperature variability, coral heat tolerance can vary significantly over small spatial gradients but it remains poorly understood how this impacts bleaching resilience and recovery dynamics, despite their importance as resilience hotspots and potential refugia. In the macrotidal Kimberley region in NW Australia, the 2016 global mass bleaching event had a strong habitat-specific impact on intertidal and subtidal coral communities at our study site: corals in the thermally variable intertidal bleached less severely and recovered within six months, while 68% of corals in the moderately variable subtidal died. We therefore conducted benthic surveys 3.5 years after the bleaching event to determine potential changes in benthic cover and coral community composition. In the subtidal, we documented substantial increases in algal cover and live coral cover had not fully recovered to pre-bleaching levels. Furthermore, the subtidal coral community shifted from being dominated by branching Acropora corals with a competitive life history strategy to opportunistic, weedy Pocillopora corals which likely has implications for the functioning and stress resilience of this novel coral community. In contrast, no shifts in algal and live coral cover or coral community composition occurred in the intertidal. These findings demonstrate that differences in coral heat tolerance across small spatial scales can have large consequences for bleaching resilience and that spatial patchiness in recovery trajectories and community reassembly after bleaching might be a common feature on thermally variable reefs. Our findings further confirm that reefs adapted to high daily temperature variability play a key role as resilience hotspots under current climate conditions, but their ability to do so may be limited under intensifying ocean warming. PeerJ Inc. 2023-09-15 /pmc/articles/PMC10506583/ /pubmed/37727686 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15987 Text en ©2023 Speelman et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Conservation Biology Speelman, P. Elias Parger, Michael Schoepf, Verena Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
title | Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
title_full | Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
title_fullStr | Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
title_full_unstemmed | Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
title_short | Divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
title_sort | divergent recovery trajectories of intertidal and subtidal coral communities highlight habitat-specific recovery dynamics following bleaching in an extreme macrotidal reef environment |
topic | Conservation Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10506583/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37727686 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.15987 |
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