We assembled a time series of 20 Landsat thematic mapper images from 1982 to 1996 for Key Largo, Florida, to ascertain whether satellite imagery can detect temporal changes in coral reef communities. Selected reef and control areas were examined for changes in brightness, spectral reflectance, band ratios, spatial texture, and temporal texture ( pixel-to-pixel change over time). We compared the...

The fossil record of Red Sea fringing reefs provides an opportunity to study the history of coral-reef survival and recovery in the context of extreme environmental change. The Middle Pleistocene, the Late Pleistocene, and modern reefs represent three periods of reef growth separated by glacial low stands during which conditions became difficult for symbiotic reef fauna. Coral diversity and pal...

There is overwhelming evidence that many local-scale human activities (e.g. fishing) have a deleterious effect on coral reef fish assemblages. Our understanding of how broad social phenomena (e.g. socioeconomic development) affect the diversity and function of coral reef fish assemblages however, is still poor. Here, we use structural equation models to reveal how human population density, soci...

Mass bleaching of shallow-water corals was observed at Lizard Island and at other locations on the Great Barrier Reef in early 1982. In a patch-reef community at Lizard Island, mortality rates of scleractinian corals from 4 families were higher during the period of bleaching than during the previous year. It is postulated that bleaching may be the result of penetration of high levels of UV radi...

This study used a reef-up approach to map coral reef benthos, substrates and bathymetry, with high spatial resolution hyperspectral image data. It investigated a physics-based inversion method for mapping coral reef benthos and substrates using readily available software: Hydrolight and ENVI. Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) data were acquired over Heron Reef in July 2002. The spec...

Citation: Bates NR (2017) Twenty Years of Marine Carbon Cycle Observations at Devils Hole Bermuda Provide Insights into Seasonal Hypoxia, Coral Reef Calcification, and Ocean Acidification. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:36. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00036 Twenty Years of Marine Carbon Cycle Observations at Devils Hole Bermuda Provide Insights into Seasonal Hypoxia, Coral Reef Calcification, and Ocean Acidifi...

Despite the potential impact of ocean acidification on ecosystems such as coral reefs, surprisingly, there is very limited field data on the relationships between calcification and seawater carbonate chemistry. In this study, contemporaneous in situ datasets of seawater carbonate chemistry and calcification rates from the high-latitude coral reef of Bermuda over annual timescales provide a fram...

The world's coral reefs are being degraded, and the need to reduce local pressures to offset the effects of increasing global pressures is now widely recognized. This study investigates the spatial and temporal dynamics of coral cover, identifies the main drivers of coral mortality, and quantifies the rates of potential recovery of the Great Barrier Reef. Based on the world's most extensive tim...

Mesophotic coral ecosystems in the Indo-Pacific remain relatively unexplored, particularly at lower mesophotic depths (≥60 m), despite their potentially large spatial extent. Here, we used a remotely operated vehicle to conduct a qualitative assessment of the zooxanthellate coral community at lower mesophotic depths (60-125 m) at 10 different locations in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and ...

In his recent paper ‘A clear human footprint in the coral reefs of the Caribbean’, Mora (2008) identifies the drivers of change in Caribbean coral reef communities based on the results of comprehensive analysis. Caution is warranted in accepting some of his major conclusions because, as he himself states, the analysis is a ‘snapshot of the potential drivers of coral reef change’ and because som...