Peter Mumby

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Biological Sciences

Boat anchoring is common at coral reefs that have high economic or social value, but anchoring has received relatively little attention in reef resilience studies. We developed an individual-based model of coral populations and simulated the effects of anchor damage over time. The model allowed us to estimate the carrying capacity of anchoring for...

Crown-of-thorns starfish (CoTS) are a pervasive coral predator prone to population outbreaks that have damaged coral reefs across Australia and the wider Indo-Pacific. CoTS population control through predation has been suggested as a primary mechanism that suppresses their outbreaks. However, the nature and rates of predation on CoTS are poorly res...

Groupers are commercially important fish for the local population of Palau. For this reason, they have been harvested for years causing a decrease in their numbers over time. The establishment of MPAs, such as Ngerumekaol Spawning Area and Ebiil Conservation Area which are closed to extractive activities, and implementation of periodic fishing bans...

The proportional cover of rubble on reefs is predicted to increase as disturbances increase in intensity and frequency. Unstable rubble can kill coral recruits and impair binding processes that consolidate rubble into a stable substrate for coral recruitment. A clearer understanding of the mechanisms of inhibited coral recovery on rubble requires c...

Global environmental change is happening at unprecedented rates. Coral reefs are among the ecosystems most threatened by global change and for wild populations to persist, they must adapt. However, little is known about corals’ complex ecological and evolutionary dynamics making prediction about potential adaptation to future conditions precarious....

With rubble predicted to increase on coral reefs worldwide, we review the physical, biological, and ecological dynamics of rubble beds, with a focus on how rubble generation, mobilization, binding, and coral recruitment is expected to change on future reefs. Major disturbances, including storms and coral bleaching, are predicted to increase in inte...

Mangrove forests store high amounts of carbon, protect communities from storms, and support fisheries. Mangroves exist in complex social-ecological systems, hence identifying socioeconomic conditions associated with decreasing losses and increasing gains remains challenging albeit important. The impact of national governance and conservation polici...

Grazing fishes farm algae, and consume algae, detritus and sediment and consequently differentially modify benthic communities. Manipulations of cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus on reefs show that cleaners affect fish abundance differently according to grazer functional group. Accordingly, whether reefs are grazed differently, with consequences fo...

1. 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 f...

To facilitate evolutionary adaptation to climate change, we must protect networks of coral reefs that span a range of environmental conditions — not just apparent ‘refugia’.

As marine species adapt to climate change, their heat tolerance will likely be under strong selection. Yet trade-offs between heat tolerance and other life history traits could compromise natural adaptation or restorative assisted evolution. This is particularly important for ecosystem engineers, such as reef-building corals, which support biodiver...

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...

Ocean warming is already causing widespread changes to coral reef ecosystems worldwide. Warming is having direct and indirect impacts on food webs, but their interaction is unclear. Warming directly affects fishes and invertebrates by increasing their metabolic rate, resulting in changes to demographic processes such as growth rates. Indirect effec...

Recent warm temperatures driven by climate change have caused mass coral bleaching and mortality across the world, prompting managers, policymakers, and conservation practitioners to embrace restoration as a strategy to sustain coral reefs. Despite a proliferation of new coral reef restoration efforts globally and increasing scientific recognition...

Chapter 12. Status and trends of coral reefs of the Caribbean region, pp. 1-25. In: Souter, D., Planes, S., Wicquart, J., Logan, M., Obura, D., & Staub, F. (Eds.) Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2020. Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, International Coral Reef Iniciative, Australian Institute of Marine Science, & Australian Governement.

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...

Complex ecological interactions are widely utilized to deliver conservation benefits but their efficacy is often debated. Using a coral reef trophic cascade as an example, we reveal that outcomes can be surprisingly difficult to detect. Even important impacts of marine reserves can go undetected (20% more coral with power < 0.5). This evidentiary c...

Structural complexity provided by the living coral reef framework is the basis of the rich and dynamic biodiversity in coral reefs. In many cases today, the reduction in habitat complexity, from live coral to dead coral and rubble, has altered the abundance and diversity of many reef species with impacts on community structure, food webs and ecosys...

Abstract. Crown-of-thorns sea stars (Acanthaster sp.) are among the most studied coral reef organisms, owing to their propensity to undergo major population irruptions, which contribute to significant coral loss and reef degradation throughout the Indo-Pacific. However, there are still important knowledge gaps pertaining to the biology, ecology, an...

In the design of marine protected areas (MPAs), tailoring reserve placement to facilitate larval export beyond reserve boundaries may support fished populations and fisheries through recruitment subsidies. Intuitively, capturing such connectivity could be purely based on optimising larval dispersal metrics such as export strength. However, this can...

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...

Humans have long sought to restore species, but little attention has been directed at how to best select a subset of foundation species for maintaining rich assemblages that support ecosystems, like coral reefs and rainforests that are increasingly threatened by environmental change. We propose a two-part hedging approach that selects optimized set...

Climate change and ENSO have triggered five mass coral bleaching events on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), three of which occurred in the last 5 years.1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Here, we explore the cumulative nature of recent impacts and how they fragment the reef’s connectivity. The coverage and intensity of thermal stress have increased steadily over t...

Cumulative impacts assessments on marine ecosystems have been hindered by the difficulty of collecting environmental data and identifying drivers of community dynamics beyond local scales. On coral reefs, an additional challenge is to disentangle the relative influence of multiple drivers that operate at different stages of coral ontogeny. We integ...

Herbivory and nutrient availability are fundamental drivers of benthic community succession in shallow marine systems, including coral reefs. Despite the importance of early community succession for coral recruitment and recovery, studies characterising the impact of top‐down and bottom‐up drivers on micro‐ and macro‐benthic communities at scales r...

Coral bleaching can have widespread impacts on reefs leaving many areas in need of coral recovery. While the long‐term mitigation of bleaching requires transitioning to a low carbon economy, local management has focused on approaches that seek refugia from or tolerance to bleaching stressors, reduce additional stressors, or facilitate coral recover...

Over this century, coral reefs will run the gauntlet of climate change, as marine heatwaves (MHWs) become more intense and frequent, and ocean acidification (OA) progresses. However, we still lack a quantitative assessment of how, and to what degree, OA will moderate the responses of corals to MHWs as they intensify throughout this century. Here, w...

Our understanding of the response of reef‐building corals to changes in their physical environment is largely based on laboratory experiments, analysis of long‐term field data, and model projections. Experimental data provide unique insights into how organisms respond to variation of environmental drivers. However, an assessment of how well experim...

Ocean acidification (OA) is negatively affecting calcification in a wide variety of marine organisms. These effects are acute for many tropical scleractinian corals under short-term experimental conditions, but it is unclear how these effects interact with ecological processes, such as competition for space, to impact coral communities over multipl...

Increasingly intense marine heatwaves threaten the persistence of many marine ecosystems. Heat stress-mediated episodes of mass coral bleaching have led to catastrophic coral mortality globally. Remotely monitoring and forecasting such biotic responses to heat stress is key for effective marine ecosystem management. The Degree Heating Week (DHW) me...

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...

Identifying organisms that play an important role in maintaining ecosystem function is a key aspect of resilience‐based management. For Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR), we found that the recovery ability of shallow exposed fore‐reefs is more than 14 times higher when tabular Acropora are present. The disproportionate role that tabular Acropora...

Corals are experiencing unprecedented decline from climate change-induced mass bleaching events. Dispersal not only contributes to coral reef persistence through demographic rescue but can also hinder or facilitate evolutionary adaptation. Locations of reefs that are likely to survive future warming therefore remain largely unknown, particularly wi...

Global environmental change is challenging species with novel conditions, such that demographic and evolutionary trajectories of populations are often shaped by the exchange of organisms and alleles across landscapes. Current ecological theory predicts that random networks with dispersal shortcuts connecting distant sites can promote persistence wh...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s00442-021-04886-y

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...

Maintaining coral reef ecosystems is a social imperative, be cause so many people depend on coral reefs for food production, shoreline protection, and livelihoods. The survival of reefs this century, however, is threatened by the mounting effects of climate change. Climate mitigation is the foremost and essential action to prevent coral reef ecosys...

Increasingly severe marine heatwaves under climate change threaten the persistence of many marine ecosystems. Mass coral bleaching events, caused by periods of anomalously warm sea surface temperatures (SST), have led to catastrophic levels of coral mortality globally. Remotely monitoring and forecasting such biotic responses to heat stress is key...

The NESP COTS Regional Scale Modelling work aimed to build on two existing advanced coral-COTS community models (CoCoNet and ReefMod-GBR) which have been widely tested and used on the GBR. The goal of this work was to incorporate descriptions of the management processes implemented in the Expanded COTS Control Program, and to assess the performance...

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...

Corals are experiencing unprecedented decline from climate change-induced mass bleaching events. Dispersal not only contributes to coral reef persistence through demographic rescue but can also hinder or facilitate evolutionary adaptation. Locations of reefs that are likely to survive future warming therefore remain largely unknown, particularly wi...

Once spectacular coral reefs have often become overrun by persistent seaweed. A new study reveals that elevating the density of herbivorous spider crabs to unnatural levels can reduce seaweed and help corals recover.

Unraveling the processes that drive diversity patterns remains a central challenge for ecology, and an increased understanding is especially urgent to address and mitigate escalating diversity loss. Studies have primarily focused on singular taxonomic groups, but recent research has begun evaluating spatial diversity patterns across multiple taxono...

The Reef Islands Initiative (RII) Whitsundays Program aims to develop a scientific, data-driven basis to support resilience-based management and guide activities of coral reef restoration in the Whitsunday Islands. To ensure that restoration activities are undertaken in the most optimal places, management decisions require baseline maps that integr...

Significance Support for marine-based “blue growth” policies derives from their potential to simultaneously address United Nations Sustainable Development (SD) Goals on poverty alleviation and marine conservation. Modeling the linkages between a rural coastal economy and local fish resources, this work provides a rigorous ex ante assessment of comm...

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...

Cumulative impacts assessments on marine ecosystems have been hindered by the difficulty of collecting environmental data and identifying drivers of community dynamics beyond local scales. On coral reefs, an additional challenge is to disentangle the relative influence of multiple drivers that operate at different stages of coral ontogeny. We integ...

Length–weight relationships (LWRs) are a fundamental tool for the non-intrusive determination of biomass, a unit of measure that facilitates the quantification of ecosystem and fisheries productivity. LWRs have been defined and broadly applied for many marine species across a range of ecosystems, especially regarding fishes. However, LWRs are yet t...

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...

The sliding and overturning of unconsolidated rubble by hydrodynamic forcing is expected to cause physical damage to settled coral recruits and asexual fragments by scouring and smothering. Yet, few empirical studies have tested the relationship between rubble mobilisation frequency and the survival and growth of these corals. Here, we tested the r...

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...

In 2017, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) convened a summit to discuss the resilience of the reef and explore the benefits of taking a resilience-based approach to its management, RBM (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority 2017). Resilience-based management is defined as “using knowledge of current and future drivers influen...

Meesters et al. (2020) raised concerns about the methodology used and conclusions drawn in our recent paper (Steneck et al., 2019). Specifically, they identified two overarching problems: (1) that our methods result in an inflated estimate of coral cover, and (2) as a result, one might infer that no extra management is needed. Neither concern is le...

Protection of coastal ecosystems from deforestation may be the best way to protect coral reefs from sediment runoff. However, given the importance of generating economic activities for coastal livelihoods, the prohibition of development is often not feasible. In light of this, logging codes of practice have been developed to mitigate the impacts of...

Climate change is impacting coral reefs now. Recent pan-tropical bleaching events driven by unprecedented global heat waves have shifted the playing field for coral reef management and policy. While best-practice conventional management remains essential, it may no longer be enough to sustain coral reefs under continued climate change. Nor will cli...

Microorganisms are fundamental drivers of biogeochemical cycling, though their contribution to coral reef ecosystem functioning is poorly understood. Here, we infer predictors of bacterioplankton community dynamics across surface-waters of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) through a meta-analysis, combining microbial with environmental data from the eRe...

Small-scale structural complexity shapes how consumers and primary producers interact, which can influence ecosystem trajectories. Coral reefs are some of the most structurally complex ecosystems, though their complexity is threatened owing to anthropogenic influences. Some reefs shift towards macroalgal dominance following mass coral mortality, wh...

Herbivorous fishes consume algae on coral reefs, and this ecological function is pivotal in helping reefs to resist and recover from disturbance. Although numerous studies have differentiated between those fishes that graze on low-profile algae and those that browse on larger fleshy macroalgae, little is known about the feeding behaviours of some h...