[Coral-List] New paper:

[Julia Baum]

Excited to share our new paper, *Transformation of coral communities
subjected to an unprecedented heatwave is modulated by local disturbance, *out
in this week's issue of Science Advances, with the coral community:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq5615
This paper is the culmination of eight expeditions to Kiritimati (Christmas
Island) conducted between 2013 and 2017, and shows the impacts of prolonged
heat stress on corals, and the modulating effects of local anthropogenic
stressors. I hope it is of interest and use to many on this list serve.

Abstract: Corals are imminently threatened by climate change–amplified
marine heatwaves. However, how to conserve coral reefs remains unclear,
since those without local anthropogenic disturbances often seem equally or
more susceptible to thermal stress as impacted ones. We disentangle this
apparent paradox, revealing that the relationship between reef disturbance
and heatwave impacts depends upon the scale of biological organization. We
show that a tropical heatwave of globally unprecedented duration (~1 year)
culminated in an 89% loss of hard coral cover. At the community level,
losses depended on pre-heatwave community structure, with undisturbed
sites, which were dominated by competitive corals, undergoing the greatest
losses. In contrast, at the species level, survivorship of individual
corals typically declined as local disturbance intensified. Our study
reveals both that prolonged heatwaves projected under climate change will
still have winners and losers and that local disturbance can impair
survival of coral species even under such extreme conditions.