Publications by authors named "Candice D Piercy"
Background: Shallow, tropical coral reefs face compounding threats from habitat degradation due to coastal development and pollution, impacts from storms and sea-level rise, and pulse disturbances like blast fishing, mining, dredging, and ship groundings that reduce coral reefs' height and variability. One approach toward restoring coral reef structure from these threats is deploying built structures. Built structures range from engineered modules and repurposed materials to underwater sculptures and intentionally placed natural rocks.
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- Shallow tropical coral reefs are under threat from climate change, coastal development, pollution, and physical disturbances, prompting efforts to restore these ecosystems using built structures.
- Restoration practitioners are increasingly employing various types of built structures, including artificial and natural interventions, but there is a lack of synthesized evidence on their effectiveness in enhancing coral growth and survival.
- To address this knowledge gap, a systematic review was conducted to map global evidence on the performance of these built structures in shallow tropical coral ecosystems across contexts like restoration and coastal protection.
Understanding the drivers of distribution and assemblage composition of aquatic organisms is an important aspect of management and conservation, especially in freshwater systems that are inordinately facing increasing anthropogenic pressures and decreasing biodiversity. For stream organisms, habitat conditions during high flows may be impossible to measure in the field, but can be an important factor for their distribution, especially for less mobile organisms like freshwater mussels. Hence, the objective of this study was to use a two dimensional HEC-RAS model to simulate hydraulic conditions during high and baseline flows (flows approx.
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