Microbial indicators of environmental perturbations in coral reef ecosystems

Resetting predator baselines in coral reef ecosystems

What did coral reef ecosystems look like before human impacts became pervasive? Early efforts to reconstruct baselines resulted in the controversial suggestion that pristine coral reefs have inverted trophic pyramids, with disproportionally large top predator biomass. The validity of the coral reef inverted trophic pyramid has been questioned, but until now, was not resolved empirically. We use...

Microbial indicators as a diagnostic tool for assessing water quality and climate stress in coral reef ecosystems

Coral reefs have flourished in tropical shallow water regions for over 240 million years (Stanley and Fautin 2001). However, during the last 30 years coral reefs have faced severe threats due to anthropogenic climate change, crown of thorns starfish (COTS), disease, overfishing and pollution (Hoegh-Guldberg 2011; De‘ath et al. 2012). For instance, the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) leads to a...

Evolution and Function of Coral Reef Ecosystems

Experimental biology of coral reef ecosystems

Coral reef ecosystems are at the crossroads. While significant gaps still exist in our understanding of how ‘‘normal’’ reefs work, unprecedented changes in coral reef systems have forced the research community to change its focus from basic research to understand how one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world works to basic research with strong applied implications to alleviate damage, sav...

Coral reef ecosystems and anthropogenic climate change

Coral reef ecosystems are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet. In addition to their value in terms of biodiversity, coral reefs provide food and resources for over 500 million people. Despite their importance, coral reefs are declining at a rapid rate (1–2% per year) as a result of a range of local (e.g., overexploitation of fisheries, declining water quality) and globa...