The negative implications of the thermal sensitivity of reef corals became clear with coral bleaching throughout the Caribbean in the 1980's, and later globally, with the severe El Niño of 1998 and extensive seawater warming in 2005. These events have substantially contributed to declines in coral cover, and therefore the El Niño of 2016 raised concerns over the implications for coral reefs; on...

zaki’s reef is located in the gulf of suez, a narrow portion of the red sea, with exceptionally dry and hot climate and lacks almost all scientific data. this research intends to describe the area’s unique climatology, which may reveal correlations between the reef’s existence at high latitude and extreme climate conditions. air temperature at zaki’s reef fluctuated between 0.3 and 58.6oc with ...

Mangroves and seagrass beds have long been perceived as important nurseries for many fish species. While there is growing evidence from the Western Atlantic that mangrove habitats are intricately connected to coral reefs through ontogenetic fish migrations, there is an ongoing debate of the value of these coastal ecosystems in the Indo-Pacific. The present study used natural tags, viz. otolith ...

Coral reefs, the most diverse of marine ecosystems, currently experience unprecedented levels of degradation. Diseases are now recognized as a major cause of mortality in reef-forming corals and are complicit in phase shifts of reef ecosystems to algal-dominated states worldwide. Even so, factors contributing to disease occurrence, spread, and impact remain poorly understood. Ecosystem resilien...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...