Coral Bleaching: The Equatorial-Refugia Hypothesis.

ABSTRACT: The rising threat of marine heatwaves has led to numerous predictions that coral reefs, especially those near the Equator, will be severely degraded by the end of the current century. Yet, environmental conditions near the Equator may regionally moderate coral bleaching by reducing thermal stress during marine heatwaves. We deployed a Bayesian spatio-temporal model over Earth to examine which environmental conditions may characterize marine-heatwave refugia for coral reefs by testing the relationship between the severity of coral bleaching and a suite of temperature, hydrodynamic, topographic, atmospheric, and biological variables. The model considered the severity of coral bleaching as the proportion of bleached hard corals during 30,266 coral-reef surveys conducted at 8728 sites, at dept

SUBMITTER: Ferris Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12621085 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature