Abstract
Coral reefs are under increasingly severe threat from climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. Anomalously high seawater temperatures in particular are known to cause coral bleaching (loss of algal symbionts in the family Symbiodiniaceae), which frequently leads to coral mortality. Remote sensing of sea surface temperature (SST) has served as an invaluable tool for monitoring physical conditions that can lead to bleaching events over relatively large scales (e.g. few kms to 100 s of kms). But, it is also well known that seawater temperatures within a site can vary significantly across depths due to the combined influence of solar heating of surface waters, water column thermal stratification, and cooling from internal waves and upwelling. We deployed small autonomous benthic temperature sensors at depths ranging from 0–40 m in fore reef, back reef, and lagoonal reef habitats on the Belize Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System from 2000–2019. These data can be used to calculate depth-specific climatologies across reef depths and sites, and emphasize the dynamic and spatially-variable nature of coral reef physical environments.
Highlights
Background & SummaryReef-building corals and their algal symbionts are highly sensitive to changes in temperature[1,2] and in particular to deviations from local climatic norms[3,4]
Increases in seawater temperature of only one or a few degrees above a bleaching threshold can lead to the breakdown of the relationship between coral hosts and their photosynthetic algal symbionts in a process known as coral bleaching or dysbiosis, which often cascades into widespread coral mortality[5] and subsequent reef ecosystem collapse[6]
The application of remotely sensed sea surface temperature (SST) data has served as a valuable predictor of coral bleaching, especially the metric of Degree Heating Weeks that incorporates both the magnitude and duration of excursions in temperature above regional climatological norms[3,4]
Summary
Reef-building corals and their algal symbionts (family Symbiodiniaceae) are highly sensitive to changes in temperature[1,2] and in particular to deviations from local climatic norms[3,4]. The cumulative number of degree days over any 12-week period is often chosen to indicate the likelihood of bleaching Recent refinements of this approach have been proposed, including the inclusion of taxon-specific vulnerability to temperature anomalies[24] and the suggestion to use in situ data collected at depth to calculate depth-specific climatologies and anomalies[17,19]. We present 15 years of seawater temperature data collected in situ using small autonomous temperature loggers over a range of depths (0–40 m) and in fore reef, back reef, and lagoonal reef environments on the Belize Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System This long-term dataset provides a novel mechanism for exploring the climatology on a site- and depth-specific basis
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