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Climate‐change refugia: shading reef corals by turbidity
Author(s) -
Cacciapaglia Chris,
Woesik Robert
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
global change biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.146
H-Index - 255
eISSN - 1365-2486
pISSN - 1354-1013
DOI - 10.1111/gcb.13166
Subject(s) - reef , coral reef , oceanography , effects of global warming on oceans , coral , climate change , environmental science , habitat , global warming , latitude , turbidity , coral bleaching , ecology , sea surface temperature , geography , geology , biology , geodesy
Coral reefs have recently experienced an unprecedented decline as the world's oceans continue to warm. Yet global climate models reveal a heterogeneously warming ocean, which has initiated a search for refuges, where corals may survive in the near future. We hypothesized that some turbid nearshore environments may act as climate‐change refuges, shading corals from the harmful interaction between high sea‐surface temperatures and high irradiance. We took a hierarchical Bayesian approach to determine the expected distribution of 12 coral species in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, between the latitudes 37°N and 37°S, under representative concentration pathway 8.5 (W m −2 ) by 2100. The turbid nearshore refuges identified in this study were located between latitudes 20–30°N and 15–25°S, where there was a strong coupling between turbidity and tidal fluctuations. Our model predicts that turbidity will mitigate high temperature bleaching for 9% of shallow reef habitat (to 30 m depth) – habitat that was previously considered inhospitable under ocean warming. Our model also predicted that turbidity will protect some coral species more than others from climate‐change‐associated thermal stress. We also identified locations where consistently high turbidity will likely reduce irradiance to <250 μmol m −2 s −1 , and predict that 16% of reef‐coral habitat ≤30 m will preclude coral growth and reef development. Thus, protecting the turbid nearshore refuges identified in this study, particularly in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the northern Philippines, the Ryukyu Islands (Japan), eastern Vietnam, western and eastern Australia, New Caledonia, the northern Red Sea, and the Arabian Gulf, should become part of a judicious global strategy for reef‐coral persistence under climate change.