Satellite-derived sea surface temperature (SST) is used to monitor coral bleaching through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW) Decision Support System (DSS). Since 2000, a broad-scale 50 km SST was used to monitor thermal stress for coral reefs globally. However, some discrepancies were noted when applied to small-scale fringing coral reefs. To address t...

The high importance of bathymetric character for many processes on reefs means that high-resolution bathymetric models are commonly needed by marine scientists and coastal managers. Empirical and optimisation methods provide two approaches for deriving bathymetry from multispectral satellite imagery, which have been refined and widely applied to coral reefs over the last decade. This paper comp...

A field program was implemented on a fringing reef located on Oahu, Hawaii, to investigate the dispersion characteristics of near-bed dye plumes, tracked using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with an onboard fluorometer. The combination of moored and AUV-based measurements collected synchronously in this study allowed us not only to observe the dispersion characteristics of individual pl...

The diet of cavity sponges on the narrow fringing reefs of Curaçao, Caribbean was studied. The origin and resources of the bulk food of these sponges, i.e., dissolved organic matter (DOM), were identified using stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes and fatty acid biomarkers. We found that phytoplankton and its derived DOM from the adjacent open sea and from reef overlying water is not the main so...

Accumulative disturbances can erode a coral reef's resilience, often leading to replacement of scleractinian corals by macroalgae or other non-coral organisms. These degraded reef systems have been mostly described based on changes in the composition of the reef benthos, and there is little understanding of how such changes are influenced by, and in turn influence, other components of the reef ...