Collaborative research: Pattern and process in the abundance and recruitment of Caribbean octocorals

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Collaborative research: Coral community resilience: testing the role of hidden diversity in Pocilloporid corals at Mo'orea

Understanding how diversity influences ecological resilience is a fundamental research question, and one that is of central importance for predicting and managing the biological effects of global change. Among reef-building corals, diversity is often studied in terms of differences in morphology or life history among species defining the roles of live coral cover in supportin...

Long-term changes in soft coral communities on shallow coral reefs

This proposal seeks Rapid Response funding for the 2017 sampling of a time-series analysis describing soft corals on shallow reefs in St. John, US Virgin Islands. The intellectual merit of the project lie in addressing how coral reefs will change in the future, but rather than focusing on the extensively-studied topic of the death of stony corals, it focuses on soft corals that are replacing stony corals in this location. My ongoi...

Long Term Ecological Research: Coral Reefs in Moorea, French Polynesia

Two of the most widely recognized threats to marine biological systems that result from increased levels of atmospheric CO2 are increased sea surface temperatures and its ?evil twin? ocean acidification (OA). A key question is how marine calcifiers, a taxiconomically diverse group including animals and algae with crucial ecological roles, are responding and will continue to respond to the inexorable changes in the inorganic ca...

Collaborative Research: RUI-Ecology and functional biology of octocoral communities

The recent past has not been good for coral reefs, and journals have been filled with examples of declining coral cover, crashing fish populations, rising cover of macroalgae, and a future potentially filled with slime. However, reefs are more than the corals and fishes for which they are known best, and their biodiversity is affected strongly by other groups of organisms. The non-coral fauna of reefs is being neg...

RUI-LTREB Renewal: Three decades of coral reef community dynamics in St. John, USVI: 2014-2019

Describing how ecosystems like coral reefs are changing is at the forefront of efforts to evaluate the biological consequences of global climate change and ocean acidification. Coral reefs have become the poster child of these efforts. Amid concern that they could become ecologically extinct within a century, describing what has been lost, what is left, and what is at risk, is of paramount importance. T...

RAPID - The implications of El Nino-related bleaching on coral recruitment in Moorea

This research explores the effects of the 2015-16 El-Niño on coral reefs in French Polynesia where the US National Science Foundation supports a Long-Term Ecological Research site. El Niño brings a diversity of unusual conditions to the Pacific Ocean, but for coral reefs the most important effect is caused by seawater warming during the summer. Bleaching, the process causing corals to lose color and die, is a dra...

Collaborative Research: Ocean Acidification and Coral Reefs: Scale Dependence and Adaptive Capacity

This project focuses on the most serious threat to marine ecosystems, Ocean Acidification (OA), and addresses the problem in the most diverse and beautiful ecosystem on the planet, coral reefs. The research utilizes Moorea, French Polynesia as a model system, and builds from the NSF investment in the Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research Site (LTER) to exploit physical and biological moni...