Coral Reef Resilience through Biodiversity

Caroline S Rogers

doi:10.5402/2013/739034

Abstract

Irrefutable evidence of coral reef degradation worldwide and increasing pressure from rising seawater temperatures and ocean acidification associated with climate change have led to a focus on reef resilience and a call to “manage” coral reefs for resilience. Ideally, global action to reduce emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will be accompanied by local action. Effective management requires reduction of local stressors, identification of the characteristics of resilient reefs, and design of marine protected area networks that include potentially resilient reefs. Future research is needed on how stressors interact, on how climate change will affect corals, fish, and other reef organisms as well as overall biodiversity, and on basic ecological processes such as connectivity. Not all reef species and reefs will respond similarly to local and global stressors. Because reef-building corals and other organisms have some potential to adapt to environmental changes, coral reefs will likely persist in spite of the unprecedented combination of stressors currently affecting them. The biodiversity of coral reefs is the basis for their remarkable beauty and for the benefits they provide to society. The extraordinary complexity of these ecosystems makes it both more difficult to predict their future and more likely they will have a future.

Highlights

Increasing concern over worldwide deterioration of coral reefs and the likelihood that global climate change will cause further degradation has led to a focus on the concept of reef resilience
Can these reefs recover and persist? Can they be managed for resilience? e future of many reefs will depend on whether fundamental processes like photosynthesis, calci cation, and recruitment can continue in the face of a multitude of local and global stressors
E limits of our current knowledge of the biodiversity of coral reefs, of the potential for corals and other reef species to adapt to climate change, and of the effects of increasing sea water temperatures, ocean acidi cation, and other components of climate change on reef organisms make it challenging to predict what the future holds for coral reefs

Summary

Introduction

Increasing concern over worldwide deterioration of coral reefs and the likelihood that global climate change will cause further degradation has led to a focus on the concept of reef resilience. Regional, and global stressors have the potential to cause irreversible losses of biodiversity in some reefs and of the ecosystem services they provide [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Is paper reviews and synthesizes scienti c literature that provides insights into the future for coral reefs in the face of climate change and explores the concept that biodiversity could help confer resilience. It evaluates the potential for management to reverse degradation, identi es some key research priorities, and explores the possibility that coral reefs will prove to be resilient primarily because of their inherent complexity and biodiversity

What Is Resilience?

Marine Reserves

Connectivity: A Prerequisite for Resilience

Biodiversity and Resilience

Findings

Conclusion