[Coral-List] Novel microCT method for separating bioerosion and secondary accretion on coral reefs

[Nyssa Silbiger]

Dear Coral-listers,
  My colleagues and I are excited to share our recent paper titled, "A
Novel μCT Analysis Reveals Different Responses of Bioerosion and Secondary
Accretion to Environmental Variability".  In this study, we detail a
procedure that aligns and digitally subtracts pre- and post-deployment μCT
scans and measures the simultaneous response of secondary accretion and
bioerosion on blocks exposed to the same environmental variation over the
same time-scale. We tested our method on a dataset from a prior study and
show that it can be used to uncover information previously unattainable
using traditional methods. We demonstrated that secondary accretion and
bioerosion are driven by different environmental parameters, bioerosion is
more sensitive to ocean acidity than secondary accretion, and net erosion
is driven more by changes in bioerosion than secondary accretion.

Here is the link to our publication:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0153058

Best,
Nyssa Silbiger

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Nyssa Silbiger, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
415 Steinhaus Hall
University of California
Irvine, California 92697-2525
http://nyssasilbiger.com