Mapped coral mortality and refugia in an archipelago-scale marine heat wave.

ABSTRACT: Corals are a major habitat-building life-form on tropical reefs that support a quarter of all species in the ocean and provide ecosystem services to millions of people. Marine heat waves continue to threaten and shape reef ecosystems by killing individual coral colonies and reducing their diversity. However, marine heat waves are spatially and temporally heterogeneous, and so too are the environmental and biological factors mediating coral resilience during and following thermal events. This combination results in highly variable outcomes at both the coral bleaching and mortality stages of every event. This, in turn, impedes the assessment of changing reef-scale patterns of thermal tolerance or places of resistance known as reef refugia. We developed a large-scale, high-resolution coral mo

SUBMITTER: Asner GP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9171643 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature