Alex David Rogers

REV Ocean · Senior Management Group

Ocean Census is a new Large-Scale Strategic Science Mission aimed at accelerating the discovery and description of marine species. This mission addresses the knowledge gap of the diversity and distribution of marine life whereby of an estimated 1 million to 2 million species of marine life between 75% to 90% remain undescribed to date. Without impr...

Since 1970, there has been an overall decline in wildlife populations in the order of 52%. Freshwater species populations have declined by 76%; species populations in Central and South America have declined by 83%; and in the Indo-Pacific by 67%. These are often not complete extinctions, but large declines in the numbers of animals in each species,...

We review the current knowledge of the biodiversity of the ocean as well as the levels of decline and threat for species and habitats. The lack of understanding of the distribution of life in the ocean is identified as a significant barrier to restoring its biodiversity and health. We explore why the science of taxonomy has failed to deliver knowle...

Seamounts are commercially important fishing grounds. Yet, little is known about their physical characteristics as fish habitat, important for informing conservation and ecosystem-based management. This study examines how multiscale seabed spatial heterogeneity influences commercially important fish families at three Southwest Indian Ridge seamount...

Context Seamounts are abundant geomorphological features creating seabed spatial heterogeneity, a main driver of deep-sea biodiversity. Despite its ecological importance, substantial knowledge gaps exist on the character of seamount spatial heterogeneity. Objectives This study aimed to map, quantify and compare seamount seascapes to test whether i...

Climate change and fishing present dual threats

A worldwide call to implement habitat protection aims to halt biodiversity loss. We constructed an open-source, standardized, and reproducible workflow that calculates two indexes to monitor the extent of coastal and marine habitats within protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures. The Local Proportion of Habitats Protect...

Context Seamounts are abundant geomorphological features creating seabed spatial heterogeneity, a main driver of deep-sea biodiversity. Despite its ecological importance, substantial knowledge gaps exist on the character of seamount spatial heterogeneity. Objectives This study aimed to map, quantify and compare seamount seascapes to test whether in...

The two most urgent and interlinked environmental challenges humanity faces are climate change and biodiversity loss. We are entering a pivotal decade for both the international biodiversity and climate change agendas with the sharpening of ambitious strategies and targets by the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework C...

Blue Economy in Practice - research and case studies that highlight where Blue Economies are being delivered

A multitude of actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural and modified ecosystems can have co-benefits for both climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Reducing greenhouse emissions to limit warming to less than 1.5 or 2°C above preindustrial levels, as outlined in the Paris Agreement, can yield strong co-benefits for land...

A worldwide call to implement habitat protection aims to halt biodiversity loss. To monitor the extent of coastal and marine habitats within protected areas (PAs) in a standardized, open source, and reproducible way, we constructed the Local and the Global Habitat Protection Indexes (LHPI and GHPI, respectively). The LHPI pinpoints the jurisdiction...

Growing human activity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is driving increasing impacts on the biodiversity of this vast area of the ocean. As a result, the United Nations General Assembly committed to convening a series of intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) to develop an international legally-binding instrument (ILBI) for the conservat...

Many biodiversity patterns across the globe can be partially explained by energetics and habitat structure, including in the deep sea. Because of difficulties in logistics, studies focusing on deep-sea benthic systems often have limited sample sets that may be far apart in space. Here, we present analyses based on a well-sampled region, the northwe...

Citation: van der Grient, J. M. A., and A. D. Rogers. 2019. Habitat structure as an alternative explanation for body-size patterns in the deep sea. Abstract. Patterns in body size are important to study as the size of an organism correlates with many biological traits of the organism. Changes in the size distribution of a community can be indicativ...

1. The ocean is the linchpin supporting life on Earth, but it is in declining health due to an increasing footprint of human use and climate change. Despite notable successes in helping to protect the ocean, the scale of actions is simply not now meeting the overriding scale and nature of the ocean's problems that confront us. 2. Moving into a post...

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development presents an exceptional opportunity to effect positive change in ocean use. We outline what is required of the deep-sea research community to achieve these ambitious objectives.

• The ocean is the linchpin supporting life on Earth, but it is in declining health due to an increasing footprint of human use and climate change. Despite notable successes in helping to protect the ocean, the scale of actions is simply not now meeting the overriding scale and nature of the ocean's problems that confront us. • Moving into a post‐C...

The ocean plays a crucial role in the functioning of the Earth System and in the provision of vital goods and services. The United Nations (UN) declared 2021–2030 as the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The Roadmap for the Ocean Decade aims to achieve six critical societal outcomes (SOs) by 2030, through the pursuit of four o...

The calving of A‐68, the 5,800‐km², 1‐trillion‐ton iceberg shed from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in July 2017, is one of over 10 significant ice‐shelf loss events in the past few decades resulting from rapid warming around the Antarctic Peninsula. The rapid thinning, retreat, and collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula are harbingers of wa...

The High Level Panel for Sustainable Ocean Economy (https://oceanpanel.org/) has commissioned a series of “Blue Papers” to explore pressing challenges at the nexus of the ocean and the economy. This paper is part of a series of 16 papers to be published between November 2019 and October 2020. It addresses how multiple human impacts will impact bi...

Life has evolved in the ocean for 3.7 billion years, resulting in a rich ‘ocean genome’, the ensemble of genetic material present in all marine biodiversity, including both the physical genes and the information they encode. Rapid advances in sequencing technologies and bioinformatics have enabled exploration of the ocean genome and are informing i...

The ‘ocean genome’ is the foundation upon which all marine ecosystems rest and is defined here as the ensemble of genetic material present in all marine biodiversity, including both the physical genes and the information they encode. The dynamics of the ocean genome enable organisms to adapt to diverse ecological niches and changing environmental c...

Genetic differentiation plays an integral role in species persistence. However, it remains challenging to quantify the ways in which the degree of isolation affects animal populations. The Common Toad (Bufo bufo) is a species of conservation concern, particularly in the UK, where populations have undergone large-scale declines. There are two types...

Despite considerable achievements in the field of conservation, biodiversity continues to decline and conservation initiatives face numerous barriers. Although many of these barriers are well known, for example insufficient funding and capacity, there has been no systematic attempt to catalogue and categorize them into a typology. Because risks com...

The deep‐sea benthos covers over 90% of seafloor area and hosts a great diversity of species which contribute toward essential ecosystem services. Evidence suggests that deep‐seafloor assemblages are structured predominantly by their physical environment, yet knowledge of assemblage/environment relationships is limited. Here, we utilized a very lar...

Faunal assemblages at hydrothermal vents associated with island-arc volcanism are less well known than those at vents on mid-ocean ridges and back-arc spreading centres. This study characterizes chemosynthetic biotopes at active hydrothermal vents discovered at the Kemp Caldera in the South Sandwich Arc. The caldera hosts sulfur and anhydrite vent...

Patterns in body size are important to study as the size of an organism correlates with many biological traits of the organism. Changes in the size distribution of a community can be indicative of environmental change and/or anthropogenic impacts. What structures body size is, however, still poorly understood, with many factors proposed and shown t...

Worldwide coral reefs face catastrophic damage due to a series of anthropogenic stressors. Investigating how coral reefs ecosystems are connected, in particular across depth, will help us understand if deeper reefs harbour distinct communities. Here, we explore changes in benthic community structure across 15-300 m depths using technical divers and...

A key obstacle to conservation success is the tendency of conservation professionals to tackle each challenge individually rather than collectively and in context. We sought to prioritize barriers to conservation previously described in the conservation literature. We undertook an online survey of 154 practitioners from over 70 countries to ascerta...

Studying scleractinian coral bleaching and recovery dynamics in remote, isolated reef systems offers an opportunity to examine impacts of global reef stressors in the absence of local human threats. Reefs in the Chagos Archipelago, central Indian Ocean, suffered severe bleaching and mortality in 2015 following a 7.5 maximum degree heating weeks (DH...

The ocean crisis is urgent and central to human wellbeing and life on Earth; past and current activities are damaging the planet's main life support system for future generations. We are witnessing an increase in ocean heat, disturbance, acidification, bio‐invasions and nutrients, and reducing oxygen levels. Several of these act like ratchets: once...

Vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs) are considered hotspots of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the deep sea, but are also characterised by a high vulnerability to disturbance and a low recovery potential. Since 2006, a series of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions have been developed, attempting to ensure the protection of...

In this article, we analyze the impacts of climate change on Antarctic marine ecosystems. Observations demonstrate large-scale changes in the physical variables and circulation of the Southern Ocean driven by warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, and a positive Southern Annular Mode. Alterations in the physical environment are driving change thro...

The physiology of mesophotic Scleractinia varies with depth in response to environmental change. Previous research has documented trends in heterotrophy and photosynthesis with depth, but has not addressed between-site variation for a single species. Environmental differences between sites at a local scale and heterogeneous microhabitats, because o...

Shallow coral reef ecosystems worldwide are affected by local and global anthropogenic stressors. Exploring fish assemblages on deeper reefs is therefore important to examine their connectivity, and to help understand the biodiversity, ecology, distinctiveness, evolutionary history and threats in this sparsely studied environment. Conducting visual...

The Chagos Archipelago, located in the central Indian Ocean and officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, contains some of the most remote reefs in the Indian Ocean. The Chagos Archipelago is comprised of a series of atolls, including the largest atoll in the world, the Great Chagos Bank. Records from surveys of mesophotic coral ecosy...

Fewer people have been to the deepest part of the ocean than have been to the moon. Even now, the vast majority of this wilderness - which covers over 70% of the planet and forms its largest ecosystem - has never been seen by human eyes, let alone explored or investigated by scientists. Yet our oceans contain perhaps 90% of all life, and the physic...

Fossil cold-water corals can be used to reconstruct physical, chemical, and biological changes in the ocean because their skeleton often preserves ambient seawater signatures. Furthermore, patterns in the geographic and temporal extent of cold-water corals have changed through time in response to environmental conditions. Here we present taxonomic...

The UN General Assembly has made a unanimous decision to start negotiations to establish an international, legally-binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity within Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ). However, there has of yet been little discussion on the importance of this move to the ecosyst...

Designation of large expanses of the ocean as Marine Protected Area (MPA) is increasingly advocated and realised. The effectiveness of such MPAs, however, requires improvements to vessel monitoring and enforcement capability. In 2014 commercial fishing was excluded from the Ascension Island Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). In 2015, through updated re...

Zooplankton form a trophic link between primary producers and higher trophic levels, and exert significant influence on the vertical transport of carbon through the water column (‘biological carbon pump’). Using a MultiNet we sampled and studied mesozooplankton communities (i.e. >0.2 mm) from six locations around Bermuda targeting four depth zones:...

Caribbean lionfish (Pterois spp.) are considered the most heavily impacting invasive marine vertebrate ever recorded. However, current management is largely inadequate, relying on opportunistic culling by recreational SCUBA divers. Culling efficiency could be greatly improved by exploiting natural aggregations, but to date this behaviour has only b...

SYNOPSIS This chapter presents an introduction to a distinct tropical coral reef ecosystem. Mesophotic coral ecosystems are found roughly between depths of 30 m and 150 m. We discuss the background of how a mesophotic research community emerged, and why this ecosystem is understudied. We cover the sometimes confusing key terms in the field, before...

Abstract Background Globally, shallow-water coral reef biodiversity is at risk from a variety of threats, some of which may attenuate with depth. Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs), occurring from 30 to 40 m and deeper in tropical locations, have been subject to a surge of research this century. Though a number of valuable narrative reviews exist,...

Deep Reef Benthos of Bermuda builds on the video and imagery data collected during Nekton’s Mission – the XL Catlin Deep Ocean Survey - and provides a photographic guide for the visual identification of many of the corals, marine plants and other common invertebrates that inhabit Bermuda’s outer deep reefs. This guide is designed to aid marine bio...

The mechanisms that determine patterns of species dispersal are important factors in the production and maintenance of biodiversity. Understanding these mechanisms helps to forecast the responses of species to environmental change. Here we used a comparative framework and genome‐wide data obtained through RAD‐seq to compare the patterns of connecti...

An understanding of the balance of interspecific competition and the physical environment in structuring organismal communities is crucial because those communities structured primarily by their physical environment typically exhibit greater sensitivity to environmental change than those structured predominantly by competitive interactions. Here, u...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175341.].

The Chagos Archipelago is geographically remote and isolated from most direct anthropogenic pressures. Here, we quantify the abundance and diversity of decapod crustaceans inhabiting dead coral colonies, representing a standardised microhabitat, across the Archipelago. Using morphological and molecular techniques we recorded 1868 decapods from 164...

Approaches to measuring marine biological parameters remain almost as diverse as the researchers who measure them. However, understanding the patterns of diversity in ocean life over different temporal and geographic scales requires consistent data and information on the potential environmental drivers. As a group of marine scientists from differen...

Coral reefs are the most biodiverse marine ecosystem and one of the most threatened by global climate change impacts. The vast majority of diversity on reefs is comprised of small invertebrates that live within the reef structure, termed the cryptofauna. This component of biodiversity is hugely understudied, and many species remain undescribed. Thi...

Seamounts are one of the major biomes of the global ocean. The last 25 years of research has seen considerable advances in the understanding of these ecosystems. The interactions between seamounts and steady and variable flows have now been characterised providing a better mechanistic understanding of processes influencing biology. Processes leadin...

Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems (MCEs) may act as a refuge for impacted shallow reefs as some of the stressors affecting tropical reefs attenuate with depth. A less impacted population at depth could provide recruits to recolonise shallow reefs. Recently, disturbance has been reported on several mesophotic reefs including storm damage, biological invas...

Non-native lionfish have been recorded throughout the western Atlantic on both shallow and mesophotic reefs, where they have been linked to declines in reef health. In this study we report the first lionfish observations from the deep sea (>200 m) in Bermuda and Roatan, Honduras, with lionfish observed to a maximum depth of 304 m off the Bermuda pl...

R script to assign a depth to each lionfish record

Lionfish GPS locations

Shallow water zooxanthellate coral reefs grade into ecologically distinct mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) deeper in the euphotic zone. MCEs are widely considered to start at an absolute depth limit of 30m deep, possibly failing to recognise that these are distinct ecological communities that may shift shallower or deeper depending on local envir...

Study scleractinia species list. All Identified Scleractinia around the island of Utila from 5 m to 85 m depth during the survey period. The taxonomic hierarchy here defines the species, genus and family level analyses conducted as part of the study. Millepora was included as a group in all analyses as a common hermatype, Scolymia spp. was included...

Scleractinia assemblage detection. The left pane shows a K means clustered Principal Co-ordinate analysis. Polygons enclose points within a cluster. The right pane shows the Calinski criterion for a different proposed number of clusters to be fitted to the data. The largest value was selected as the best choice of number of clusters, denoted by a h...

Generalised R code for K-means clustering and generating Fig 4. This R code will take an ecological matrix as detailed in the header, perform K-means clustering and extract the optimal solution. Associations of species are plotted and Defrene-Legendre analysis indicates how similar the species on a given transect are to identified assemblages. Fina...