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. Coral bleaching events continue to drive the degradation of coral reefsworldwide, causing a shift in the benthic community from coral- to algae-dominated ecosystems. Critically, this shift may decrease the capacity ofdegraded coral reef communities to maintain net positive accretion duringwarming-driven stress events (e.g., reef-wide coral bleaching). Here wemeasured rates of net ecosystem calcification (NEC) and net ecosystemproduction (NEP) on a degraded coral reef lagoon community (coral cover  20 %) during a reef-widebleaching event in February 2020 at Heron Island on the Great BarrierReef. We found that during this bleaching event, rates of NEP and NEC acrossreplicate transects remained positive and did not change in response tobleaching. Repeated benthic surveys over a period of 20 d indicated anincrease in the percent area of bleached coral tissue, corroborated byrelatively low Symbiodiniaceae densities (∼ 0.6 × 106 cm−2) and dark-adapted photosynthetic yields in photosystem II ofcorals (∼ 0.5) sampled along each transect over this period.Given that a clear decline in coral health was not reflected in the overallNEC estimates, it is possible that elevated temperatures in the water columnthat compromise coral health enhanced the thermodynamic favorability forcalcification in other ahermatypic benthic calcifiers. These data suggestthat positive NEC on degraded reefs may not equate to the net positiveaccretion of a complex, three-dimensional reef structure in a future, warmerocean. Critically, our study highlights that if coral cover continues todecline as predicted, NEC may no longer be an appropriate proxy for reefgrowth as the proportion of the NEC signal owed to ahermatypic calcificationincreases and coral dominance on the reef decreases.

Will daytime community calcification reflect reef accretion on future, degraded coral reefs?