Paradise lost: End-of-century warming and acidification under business-as-usual emissions have severe consequences for symbiotic corals.

Despite recent efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, current global emission trajectories are still following the business-as-usual representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 emission pathway. The resulting ocean warming and acidification have transformative impacts on coral reef ecosystems, detrimentally affecting coral physiology and health, and these impacts are predicted to worsen in the near future.

Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities.

Climate change is expected to have profound, partly unforeseeable effects on the composition of functional traits of complex ecosystems, such as coral reefs, and some ecosystem properties are at risk of disappearing. This study applies a novel spatially explicit, individual-based model to explore three critical life history traits of corals: heat tolerance, competitiveness and growth performance under various environmental settings. Building upon these findings, we test the adaptation potential required by a coral community in order to not only survive but also retain its diversity by the end of this century under different IPCC climate scenarios.

Simulations of long-term community dynamics in coral reefs--how perturbations shape trajectories.

Tropical coral reefs feature extraordinary biodiversity and high productivity rates in oligotrophic waters. Due to increasing frequencies of perturbations--anthropogenic and natural--many reefs are under threat. Such perturbations often have devastating effects on these unique ecosystems and especially if they occur simultaneously and amplify each other's impact, they might trigger a phase shift and create irreversible conditions.