Robert Van Woesik

Florida Institute of Technology · Department of Biological Sciences

Ever since the first image of a coral reef was captured in 1885, people worldwide have been accumulating images of coral reefscapes that document the historic conditions of reefs. However, these innumerable reefscape images suffer from perspective distortion, which reduces the apparent size of distant taxa, rendering the images unusable for quantit...

Coral reefs support the world’s most diverse marine ecosystem and provide invaluable goods and services for millions of people worldwide. They are however experiencing frequent and intensive marine heatwaves that are causing coral bleaching and mortality. Coarse-grained climate models predict that few coral reefs will survive the 3 °C sea-surface t...

Corals are being increasingly subjected to marine heatwaves. Theory suggests that increasing the intensity of disturbances reduces recovery rates, which inspired us to examine the recovery rates of coral cover following marine heatwaves, cyclones, and other disturbances at 1921 study sites, in 58 countries and three oceans, from 1977 to 2020. In th...

The population decline and lack of natural recovery of multiple coral species along the Florida reef tract have instigated the expanding application of coral restoration and conservation efforts. Few studies, however, have determined the optimal locations for the survival of outplanted coral colonies from restoration nurseries. This study predicts...

Thermal-stress events on coral reefs lead to coral bleaching, mortality, and changes in species composition. The coral reefs of Yap, in the Federated States of Micronesia, however, remained largely unaffected by major thermal-stress events until 2020, when temperatures were elevated for three months. Twenty-nine study sites were examined around Yap...

Anomalously high ocean temperatures have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration over the last several decades because of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and marine heatwaves. Reef-building corals are sensitive to such temperature anomalies that commonly lead to coral bleaching, mortality, and changes in community structu...

Coral reefs support the ocean’s highest biodiversity, protect coastlines from storm waves, and supply sustenance for millions of people. Yet reef corals have become sentinel species of modern oceans because of their sensitivity to thermal stress associated with high emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the oceans. The recent increase in t...

Coral reefs are declining worldwide primarily because of bleaching and subsequent mortality resulting from thermal stress. Currently, extensive efforts to engage in more holistic research and restoration endeavors have considerably expanded the techniques applied to examine coral samples. Despite such advances, coral bleaching and restoration studi...

The global impacts of climate change are evident in every marine ecosystem. On coral reefs, mass coral bleaching and mortality have emerged as ubiquitous responses to ocean warming, yet one of the greatest challenges of this epiphenomenon is linking information across scientific disciplines and spatial and temporal scales. Here we review some of th...

Marine heatwaves can cause coral bleaching and reduce coral cover on reefs, yet few studies have identified “bright spots,” where corals have recently shown a capacity to survive such pressures. We analyzed 7714 worldwide surveys from 1997 to 2018 along with 14 environmental and temperature metrics in a hierarchical Bayesian model to identify condi...

Coral reefs are the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems that provide resources and services that benefit millions of people globally. Yet, coral reefs have recently experienced an increase in the frequency and intensity of thermal-stress events that are causing coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is a result of the breakdown of the symbiosis betwee...

Over the past three decades, coral populations have declined across the tropical and subtropical oceans because of thermal stress, coral diseases, and pollution. Restoration programs are currently attempting to re-establish depauperate coral populations along the Florida reef tract. We took an integrated Bayesian approach to determine which Florida...

Think globally, act locally Climate change–driven elevations in temperature over the past few decades have caused repeated coral bleaching and subsequent death. The impact is so widespread that it has been suggested that only climate change reversal can save coral reefs globally. Donovan et al. looked at the interaction between local conditions and...

Coral bleaching is the single largest global threat to coral reefs worldwide. Integrating the diverse body of work on coral bleaching is critical to understanding and combating this global problem. Yet investigating the drivers, patterns, and processes of coral bleaching poses a major challenge. A recent review of published experiments revealed a w...

Coral reefs protect islands, coastal areas, and their inhabitants from storm waves and provide essential goods and services to millions of people worldwide. Yet contemporary rates of ocean warming and local disturbances are jeopardizing the reef-building capacity of coral reefs to keep up with rapid rates of sea-level rise. This study compared the...

Increases in the frequency and intensity of acute and chronic disturbances are causing declines of coral reefs world‐wide. Although quantifying the responses of corals to acute disturbances is well documented, detecting subtle responses of coral populations to chronic disturbances is less common, but can also result in altered population and commun...

In recent decades, the Florida reef tract has lost over 95% of its coral cover. Although isolated coral assemblages persist, coral restoration programs are attempting to recover local coral populations. Listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, Acropora cervicornis is the most widely targeted coral species for restoration in Florida. Y...

Aim Modern pollen assemblages provide a means to calibrate fossil pollen data and to provide a translation from habitat and vegetation type to pollen representation. Here we provide a database of modern pollen abundances from a broad range of neotropical habitats and locations. Location The Neotropics, especially western Amazonia, the Andes, The G...

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events modulate oceanographic processes that control temperature and productivity in tropical waters, yet potential interactions with low frequency climate variability, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), are poorly understood. We show that ENSO and PDO together predicted (i) maximum sea-surface temper...

Over the last three decades corals have declined precipitously in the Florida Keys. Their population decline has prompted restoration effort. Yet, little effort has been invested in understanding the contemporary niche spaces of coral species, which could assist in prioritizing conservation habitats. We sought to predict the probability of occurren...

A rapid increase in sea‐level rise is generating vertical accommodation space on modern coral reefs. Yet increases in sea‐surface temperatures (SSTs) are reducing the capacity of coral reefs to keep up with sea‐level rise. We use ensemble species distribution models of four coral species (Porites rus, Porites lobata, Acropora hyacinthus and Acropor...

The stony-coral-tissue-loss disease (SCTLD) has recently caused widespread loss of coral along the Florida reef tract. Yet little is known about where, when, and why this coral disease outbreak occurred. In the absence of a definitive pathogen, it is essential to characterize the ecology of the disease and document the spatio-temporal dynamics of t...

Thermal‐stress events that cause coral bleaching and mortality have recently increased in frequency and severity. Yet few studies have explored conditions that moderate coral bleaching. Given that high light and high ocean temperature together cause coral bleaching, we explore whether corals at turbid localities, with reduced light, are less likely...

This study hindcast the geographic distribution of 18 Indo-Pacific scleractinian coral species, with different sensitivities to modern heat stress, into the last glacial maximum (LGM), some 18,000 years ago, when sea surface temperatures were 2–4oC cooler and sea level was ~130 m lower than on contemporary reefs. Identifying geographic provinces fr...

Anthropogenic activities are increasing ocean temperature and decreasing ocean pH. Some coastal habitats are experiencing increases in organic runoff, which when coupled with a loss of vegetated coastline can accelerate reductions in seawater pH. Marine larvae that hatch in coastal habitats may not have the ability to respond to elevated temperatur...

Coral reefs are essential to millions of island inhabitants. Yet, coral reefs are threatened by thermal anomalies associated with climate change and by local disturbances that include land-use change, pollution, and the coral-eating sea star Acanthaster solaris. In combination, these disturbances cause coral mortality that reduce the capacity of re...

Thermal-stress events associated with climate change cause coral bleaching and mortality that threatens coral reefs globally. Yet coral bleaching patterns vary spatially and temporally. Here we synthesize field observations of coral bleaching at 3351 sites in 81 countries from 1998 to 2017 and use a suite of environmental covariates and temperature...

Thermal-stress events are changing the composition of many coral reefs worldwide. Yet, determining the rates of coral recovery and their long-term responses to increasing sea-surface temperatures is challenging. To do so, we first estimated coral recovery rates following past disturbances on reefs in southern Japan and Western Australia. Recovery r...

Expert and intelligent systems based on computer-vision algorithms are becoming a common part of our daily lives, as they help us solve problems in areas such as medicine, agriculture, transportation, and ecology. In this paper, we focus on the application of computer vision in marine ecology. Here, we propose a new algorithm for mosaicing images o...

Coral reefs protect islands from tropical storm waves and provide goods and services for millions of islanders worldwide. Yet it is unknown how coral reefs in general, and carbonate production in particular, will respond to sea-level rise and thermal stress associated with climate change. This study compared the reef-building capacity of different...

The file is a compressed file that contains all the raw data files as Excel spreadsheet tables and all the R scripts that produced the figures in the manuscript; note that there is a Read me file, which explains the content of each file. (RAR)

The file contains supporting tables and figures not in the main manuscript. The file includes a table on morphological adjustments for corals that were used in the calculations, laboratory measured skeletal densities used in the calculations, the contribution of each coral and herbivorous fish species per island, kriged maps of the contribution of...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Aim Coral reefs are experiencing both an increasing frequency and intensity of anomalously warm ocean temperatures because of climate change. Studies show that the majority of coral populations will likely decline as temperatures continue to increase, although some previous species‐distribution models predict that ubiquitous species, such as the pr...

Recent declines in coral populations along the Florida reef tract have prompted the establishment of coral restoration programs which raise coral species, such as the threatened Acropora cervicornis, in nurseries ready for outplanting. Large numbers of nursery-reared coral colonies have been outplanted along the Florida reef tract in recent years,...

Disease outbreaks continue to reduce coral populations worldwide. Understanding coral diseases and their relationships with environmental drivers is necessary to forecast disease outbreaks, and to predict future changes in coral populations. Yet, the temporal dynamics of coral diseases are rarely reported. Here we evaluate trends and periodicities...

Over the last three decades reef corals have been subjected to an unprecedented frequency and intensity of thermal-stress events, which have led to extensive coral bleaching, disease, and mortality. Over the next century, the climate is predicted to drive sea-surface temperatures to even higher levels, consequently increasing the risk of mass bleac...

Recent outbreaks of coral diseases in the Caribbean have been linked to increasingly stressful sea-surface temperatures (SSTs). Yet, ocean warming is spatially heterogeneous and therefore has the potential to lead to hotspots of disease activity. Here, we take an epidemiological approach to examine spatial differences in the risk of white-band dise...

The long-term interaction between human activity and climate is subject to increasing scrutiny. Humans homogenize landscapes through deforestation, agriculture, and burning and thereby might reduce the capacity of landscapes to provide archives of climate change. Alternatively, land-use change might overwhelm natural buffering and amplify latent cl...

We describe the Bayesian user-friendly model for palaeo-environmental reconstruction (BUMPER), a Bayesian transfer function for inferring past climate and other environmental variables from microfossil assemblages. BUMPER is fully self-calibrating, straightforward to apply, and computationally fast, requiring ∼ 2 s to build a 100-taxon model from a...

There is an urgent need to quantify coral reef benchmarks that assess changes and recovery rates through time and serve as goals for management. Yet, few studies have identified benchmarks for hard coral cover and diversity in the center of marine diversity. In this study, we estimated coral cover and generic diversity benchmarks on the Tubbataha r...

We describe the Bayesian User-friendly Model for Palaeo-Environmental Reconstruction (BUMPER), a Bayesian transfer function for inferring past climate from microfossil assemblages. BUMPER is fully self-calibrating, straightforward to apply, and computationally fast, requiring ~2 seconds to build a 100-species model from a 100-site training-set on a...

With the current rapid rate of climate change, coral communities are being repeatedly subjected to anomalously high thermal-stress events. Most global models predict that within the next 100 years, few reef corals will survive in tropical oceans. Yet thermal stresses have long been spatially and temporally variable across the oceans, and coral comm...

Anomalously high water temperatures, associated with climate change, are increasing the global prevalence of coral bleaching, coral diseases, and coral-mortality events. Coral bleaching and disease outbreaks are often inter-related phenomena, since many coral diseases are a consequence of opportunistic pathogens that further compromise thermally st...

Over the last half-century, coral diseases have contributed to the rapid decline of coral populations throughout the Caribbean region. Some coral diseases appear to be potentially infectious, yet little is known about their modes of transmission. This study experimentally tested whether dark-spot syndrome on Siderastrea siderea was directly or indi...

Heatmaps of the relative abundance of bacteria. Heatmaps of the relative abundance of bacteria identified on each sample of healthy, exposed, and diseased coral tissue, tested in waterborne transmission experiments of dark-spot syndrome on Siderastrea siderea. Bacteria were examined at the class (a), order (b), family (c), and genus (d) taxonomic l...

Heatmap of the relative abundance of OTUs. Heatmap of the relative abundance of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) identified on each sample of exposed, and diseased coral tissue, tested in waterborne transmission experiments of dark-spot syndrome on Siderastrea siderea. A cluster dendrogram is indicated above the heatmap. (PDF)

Shannon-Weiner diversity indices. Shannon-Weiner diversity of microbes, at six taxonomic levels, in three samples each of healthy (H), exposed (E) and diseased (D) coral tissue, tested in waterborne transmission experiments of dark-spot syndrome on Siderastrea siderea. (PDF)

Absolute abundance of OTUs in each coral sample. Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and their corresponding classifications and percentage homology for each of nine coral samples of Siderastrea siderea tested in waterborne-transmission experiments of dark-spot syndrome. D4U, D13U and D27U were healthy corals; D1L, D3L and D22L were exposed corals;...

Mean relative abundance of individual bacterial taxa in diseased, exposed and healthy corals. Only taxa whose relative abundances were significantly different among treatments, as determined by a Kruskal-Wallis rank-sum test using a chi-squared distribution are reported. Error bars denote standard deviation. n = 3. (PDF)

Comparison of class-level bacterial data from the current study with Kellogg et al. [37]. Cluster dendrogram is based on the relative abundance of class-level bacterial data from healthy and dark-spot affected Siderastrea siderea from the Florida Keys in 2013 (present study) compared with the Dry Tortugas and St. John, USVI in 2009 (Kellogg et al....

Results of non-parametric analyses of variance of five purported pathogen taxa. Results of Kruskal-Wallis rank-sum tests using a chi-squared distribution comparing relative abundances of bacteria of six purported pathogenic taxa on diseased, exposed, and healthy corals colonies (~16 cm2) at the completion of laboratory-based dark-spot syndrome tran...

Nucleotide sequences for OTUs. Nucleotide sequences for all operational taxonomic units (OTUs) identified on Siderastrea siderea corals tested in waterborne transmission experiments of dark-spot syndrome. (XLSX)

Coral reefs have recently experienced an unprecedented decline as the world's oceans continue to warm. Yet global climate models reveal a heterogeneously warming ocean, which has initiated a search for refuges, where corals may survive in the near future. We hypothesized that some turbid nearshore environments may act as climate-change refuges, sha...

Typhoons generally develop in the warm tropics, but rarely damage coral reefs between the latitudes 10° N and 10° S because they intensify at higher latitudes. However, climate change is forcing anomalous weather patterns, and is causing typhoons to take less predictable trajectories. For the first time in 70 yr, in December 2012, a super typhoon p...

Cold-water conditions have excluded durophagous (skeleton-breaking) predators from the Antarctic seafloor for millions of years. Rapidly warming seas off the western Antarctic Peninsula could now facilitate their return to the continental shelf, with profound consequences for the endemic fauna. Among the likely first arrivals are king crabs (Lithod...

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...

The Zanzibar Channel lies between the mainland of Tanzania and Zanzibar Island in the tropical western Indian Ocean, is about 100 km long, 40 km wide, and 40 m deep, and is essential to local socioeconomic activities. This paper presents a model of the seasonal and tidal dynamics of the Zanzibar Channel based on the Regional Ocean Modeling System (...

Fishing and pollution are chronic stressors that can prolong recovery of coral reefs and contribute to ecosystem decline. While this premise is generally accepted, management interventions are complicated because the contributions from individual stressors are difficult to distinguish. The present study examined the extent to which fishing pressure...