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Introduction
ecology • corals • plants • fish • fossils
Additional affiliations
August 2010 - present
Publications
Publications (169)
Modern-day Indo-Pacific coral reefs are characterized by rapid recovery driven by pulses of coral recruitment, but Caribbean reefs exhibit low rates of recruitment and poor recovery following a wide range of disturbance events. The contrasting evolutionary history of coral taxa offers key insight into biogeographic patterns of coral resilience. Fol...
Sedimentation and overfishing are important local stressors on coral reefs that can independently result in declines in coral recruitment and shifts to algal-dominated states. However, the role of herbivory in driving recovery across environmental gradients is often unclear. Here we investigate early successional benthic communities and coral recru...
In recent decades, extensive mortality of reef-building corals throughout the Caribbean region has led to the erosion of reef frameworks and declines in biodiversity. Using field observations, structural models, and high-precision U–Th dating methods, we quantify changes in structural complexity in the major framework-building coral Orbicella annul...
Overexploitation of large apex marine predators is widespread in the world’s oceans, yet the timing and extent of declines are poorly understood. Here we reconstruct a unique fisheries-independent dataset from a shark control programme spanning 1760 km of the Australian coastline over the past 55 years. We report substantial declines (74–92%) of ca...
Anthropogenic pressures are impacting coastal marine ecosystems, necessitating large-scale interventions to accelerate recovery. Propagule-based restoration holds the potential for restoring shallow coastal systems at hectare scales by harnessing natural dispersal. However, predicting propagule dispersal remains challenging due to the complex hydro...
Earth's ecological assemblages are rapidly being driven towards unprecedented, novel states. We know little about ecological novelty in our oceans, limiting our ability to detect, contextualise, and manage substantive anthropogenic change. This is especially true for novel states with altered functional compositions. Here, we provide a quantitative...
Climate change projections for coral reefs are founded exclusively on sea surface temperatures (SST). While SST projections are relevant for the shallowest reefs, neglecting ocean stratification overlooks the striking differences in temperature experienced by deeper reefs for all or part of the year. Density stratification creates a buoyancy barrie...
The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for larval-based restoration has been developed in collaboration between CSIRO and the Maldives Marine Research Institute (MMRI). to provide a practical guide for the use of larval-based restoration in the Maldives. The SOP is separated into four main sections: 1) Before coral spawning, 2) During coral spawnin...
In the absence of detailed broad-scale studies, both spatially and temporally, the overall status (disturbed, recovering, or in decline) of many of the reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef remains uncertain. Moreover, of the numerous and varied threats, their relative role in impacting individual reefs is generally unclear. Here, we adopt a no...
Quantifying patterns of dispersal and settlement in marine benthic invertebrates is challenging, largely due the complexity of life history traits, small sizes of larvae (<1 mm), and potential for large-scale dispersal (>100 km) in the marine environment. Here, we develop a novel method that allows for immediate differentiation and visual tracking...
Biodiversity of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, is dominated by small, often cryptic, invertebrate taxa that play important roles in ecosystem structure and functioning. While cryptofauna community structure is determined by strong small‐scale microhabitat associations, the extent to which ecological and environmental fact...
High-latitude habitats have become increasingly recognized as a potential climate refuge for coral communities, supporting both tropical and sub-tropical corals. Despite the increasing interest in the ecology of high-latitude corals, our current knowledge of their temporal dynamics is limited, especially within urbanized settings. Here, we examined...
Increases in the magnitude, frequency, and duration of warm seawater temperatures are causing mass coral mortality events across the globe. Although, even during the most extensive bleaching events, some reefs escape exposure to severe stress, constituting potential refugia. Here, we identify present‐day climate refugia on the Great Barrier Reef (G...
Ecologists have long sought to understand larval dispersal characteristics of benthic marine invertebrates. Direct quantification of coral larvae dispersal has proven challenging, in part due to their complex life-history, minute size, and widespread dispersal at the scale of kilometres. Instead, indirect methods such as particle modelling, chemica...
COVER PHOTO: Lighthouse Reef, Palau, Micronesia, in a healthy state in 2012 prior to a super typhoon which reduced coral cover to zero percent. In their study published in The Scientific Naturalist section of this issue, Doropoulos et al. (Article e3621; doi:10.1002/ecy.3621) document the recovery of corals at Lighthouse Reef over a seven‐year peri...
Over the past 4 decades there has been a growing concern for the conservation status of elasmobranchs (sharks and rays). In 2002, the first elasmobranch species were added to Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Less than 20 yr later, there were 39 species on Appendix II and 5 o...
Coral reefs are experiencing a dramatic loss of hard coral abundance and associated habitat structure from a myriad of local and global factors. Here, utilizing U-Th radiometric age-dating of coral death assemblages, we investigated patterns of coral mortality from the eastern margin of the Red Sea along a latitudinal gradient (Yanbu, 24o N; Thuwal...
Tropical coral reefs are among the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change and will benefit from the more ambitious aims of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Paris Agreement, which proposed to limit global warming to 1.5° rather than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Only in the latest IPCC focussed assessment, the Coup...
Reefs are biogenic structures that result in three-dimensional accumulations of calcium carbonate. Over geological timescales, a positive balance between the production and accumulation of calcium carbonate versus erosional and off-reef transport processes maintains positive net accretion on reefs. Yet, how ecological processes occurring over decad...
This project synthesizes and refines the carbonate budget produced for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Wolfe et al. (2019). Here, we present robust methodological advances to facilitate the calculation of carbonate budgets for the GBR, including:
1. The first method to quantify carbonate budgets using percent-cover data, alleviating the requirement...
By 2004, Belize was exhibiting classic fishing down of the food web. Groupers (Serranidae) and snappers (Lutjanidae) were scarce and fisheries turned to parrotfishes (Scarinae), leading to a 41% decline in their biomass. Several policies were enacted in 2009–2010, including a moratorium on fishing parrotfish and a new marine park with no‐take areas...
Global overfishing of higher‐level predators has caused cascading effects to lower trophic levels in many marine ecosystems. On coral reefs, which support highly diverse food webs, the degree to which top‐down trophic cascades can occur remains equivocal. Using extensive survey data from coral reefs across the relatively unfished northern Great Bar...
Stress-induced reductions in the world's coral populations are, in many locations, giving way to an increase in macroalgae, for example the common brown macroalgal genus Lobophora. While many ecological studies report a single species (Lobo-phora variegata), DNA-based identification methods have recently shown that Lobophora is a highly diverse gen...
In the face of changing global climate the future of corals reefs is uncertain. High latitude reefs may offer potential refugia for corals under projected increasing sea surface temperatures (SSTs). To understand the reef growth potential of modern high latitude reefs it is first necessary to understand past reef growth and response to climatic and...
The frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves that result in coral bleaching events have increased over recent decades and led to catastrophic losses of reef-building corals in many regions. The high-latitude coral assemblages at Lord Howe Island, which is a UNESCO listed site is the world southernmost coral community, were exposed to successive...
Space availability is a key factor linked to the settlement success of marine invertebrates. Settlement space on coral reefs is predicted to become increasingly fragmented and occupied by competitors under future disturbance regimes, yet how this impacts coral settlement remains largely unknown. We test the effects of space limitation on larval set...
Reconstructing coral reef histories provides a window of understanding into reef response to changing environmental and climatic conditions over various temporal scales. Here we present the results of 117 U‐Th dates from emergent reef flat and slope cores and surface death assemblages, combined with previously published fossil microatoll data, to c...
As oceans continue to warm under climate change, understanding the differential growth responses of corals is increasingly important. Scleractinian corals exhibit a broad range of life-history strategies, yet few studies have explored interspecific variation in long-term growth rates under a changing climate. Here we studied growth records of two c...
In recent decades, extensive mortality of reef-building corals throughout the Caribbean region has led to erosion of reef frameworks and declines in biodiversity. Using field observations, structural models and high-precision U-th dating methods, we quantify changes in structural complexity in the major framework building coral Orbicella annularis...
Plain Language Summary
Determining accurate chronologies of sand cay formation is key to understanding their temporal dynamics and stability and their potential as paleo‐archives. We reconstruct the growth of a sand cay strongly influenced by frequent tropical cyclones in the South China Sea. Accelerator mass spectrometry ¹⁴C and U/Th dating of cor...
High‐precision uranium‐thorium (U‐Th) dating of dead branching corals from Luhuitou reef, Sanya, northern South China Sea indicates that the reef framework grew episodically over the past 7,000 years. Episodes of coral reef growth (“switch‐on” phases) occurred in response to regional warming during the mid‐Holocene Climate Optimum, Medieval Warm Pe...
Extreme disturbances often lead to community reorganisations, yet sometimes ecosystems unexpectedly fail to recover. Such surprising outcomes may pinpoint important yet overlooked mechanisms that drive ecosystems into undesirable states. Using long-term field observations, experimental manipulations and mechanistic modelling, we document the driver...
Marine environments face acute pressures from human impacts, often resulting in substantial changes in community structure. On the inshore Great Barrier Reef (GBR), paleoecological studies show the collapse of the previously dominant coral Acropora from the impacts of degraded water quality associated with European colonization. Even more dramatic...
Notionally herbivorous fishes maintains a critical ecosystem function on coral reefs by grazing algae and maintaining highly productive algal turf assemblages. Current paradigms implicate habitat complexity, predation, and primary productivity as major drivers of the distribution and abundance of herbivorous fish, yet little is known about the rela...
In an era of global change and rising sea levels, the capacity for inshore reefs to survive is increasingly unclear. We report on recent colonization of an inshore reef-flat environment at Sanya Bay, northern South China Sea, in shallow, muddy, eutrophic, and turbid conditions, which are widely viewed as marginal for sustained coral growth. U-Th da...
The assessment of the conservation status of wide ranging species depends on estimates of the magnitude of their population trends. The accuracy of trend estimates will depend on where and how many locations within a species’ range are sampled. We ask how the spatial extent of sampling interacts with non-linear patterns in long-term trends to affec...
Reconstructions of ocean temperatures prior to the industrial era serve to constrain natural climate variability on decadal to centennial timescales, yet relatively few such observations are available from the west Pacific Warm Pool. Here we present multiple coral-based sea surface temperature reconstructions from Yongle Atoll, in the South China S...
Significance
Branching Acropora corals are highly sensitive to environmental change and warrant close monitoring to avoid irreversible changes in ecosystem health. For the Great Barrier Reef, limited baseline information of ecological dynamics prior to ∼1980 makes it difficult to understand recent ecosystem trends. We demonstrate the use of high-re...
The present study reports a previously undocumented mass spawning aggregation and group spawning phenomena of c. 1200 individual bumphead parrotfish Bolbometopon muricatum in Palau, Micronesia. Although B. muricatum are protected in Palau, it is further recommended that management strategies should consider establishment of no-take zones at B. muri...
Studies on the growth response of corals to changing climate have largely focused on long-lived corals
with relatively distinct density bands such as massive Porites corals. Little is known about the climatic response of other more abundant growth forms, such as branching Acropora corals, largely because of the absence of a clear annual density ban...
Appendix S1 Null model approach To assess whether mean values of functional richness (FRic) and functional dispersion (FDis) at different levels of wave exposure were significantly different from those that could have emerged due to random community assembly processes, or from differences in species richness and bites per exposure level, we used a...
Figure S1 Benthic features across levels of wave exposure Fig. S1. (a) Primary productivity was significantly higher at moderate and high wave exposures (P = 0.01), and (b) marginally-significant differences in percent cover of grazable substrata occurred between high and low levels of wave exposure (P = 0.06). Mean growth rate of ungrazed algal tu...
Community succession following disturbance depends on positive and negative interactions, the strength of which change along environmental gradients. To investigate how early succession affects coral reef recovery, we conducted an 18 month experiment in Palau, using recruitment tiles and herbivore exclusion cages. One set of reefs has higher wave e...
1.While environmental filters are well known factors influencing community assembly, the extent to which these modify species functions, and entire ecosystem processes is poorly understood.
2.Focusing on a high-diversity system we ask whether environmental filtering has ecosystem-wide effects beyond community assembly. We characterise a coral reef...
As climate change progresses, understanding the long-term response of corals and their endosymbionts (Symbiodinium) to prolonged environmental change is of immediate importance. Here, a total of 1152 fragments from 72 colonies of three common coral species (Stylophora pistillata, Pocillopora damicornis, Seriatopora hystrix) underwent a 32-month rec...
Prograded coral rubble ridges have been widely used as archives for reconstructing long-term storm or storminess history. Chronologies of ridge systems in previous studies are often based on a limited number of low-resolution radiocarbon or optically-stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages per ridge (usually only one age per ridge), which carry intrinsi...
In our recent review of the ecological roles
of sharks on coral reefs, we concluded
that the evidence to support hypothesised
shark-driven trophic cascades on coral
reefs was weak and equivocal. In their
response to our review, Ruppert et al.
[2] assert that a major issue with our
approach was that we primarily reviewed
evidence from correlative ob...
Sharks are considered the apex predator of coral reefs, but the consequencesof their global depletion are uncertain. Here we explore the ecological roles of sharks on coral reefs and, conversely, the importance of reefs for sharks. We find that most reef-associated shark species do not act as apex predators but
instead function as mesopredators alo...
Drivers of recruitment in sessile marine organisms are often poorly understood, due to the rapidly changing requirements experienced during early ontogeny. The complex suite of physical, biological and ecological interactions beginning at larval settlement involve a series of trade-offs that influence recruitment success. For example, while cryptic...
Since the Mid-Holocene, some 5000 years ago, coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean have been vertically constrained by sea level. Contemporary sea-level rise is releasing these constraints, providing accommodation space for vertical reef expansion. Here, we show that Porites microatolls, from reef-flat environments in Palau (western Pacific Ocean), are...
As the frequency and intensity of coral mortality events increase under climate change, understanding how declines in coral cover may affect the bioerosion of reef frameworks is of increasing importance. Here, we explore decadal-scale rates of bioerosion of the framework building coral Orbicella annularis by grazing parrotfish following the 1997/19...