A Donor Registry: Genomic Analyses of Seagrass Meadows Identifies Adaptive Genotypes for Future-Proofing.

Globally, anthropogenic climate change has caused declines of seagrass ecosystems necessitating proactive restoration approaches that would ideally anticipate future climate scenarios, such as marine warming. In eastern Australia, estuaries with meadows of the endangered seagrass s have warmed and acidified over the past decade, and seagrass communities have declined in some estuaries. Securing these valuable habitats will require proactive conservation and restoration efforts that could be augmented with restoration focussed on boosting resilience to future climate.

Continent-wide declines in shallow reef life over a decade of ocean warming.

Human society is dependent on nature, but whether our ecological foundations are at risk remains unknown in the absence of systematic monitoring of species' populations. Knowledge of species fluctuations is particularly inadequate in the marine realm. Here we assess the population trends of 1,057 common shallow reef species from multiple phyla at 1,636 sites around Australia over the past decade.

Climate change threatens unique evolutionary diversity in Australian kelp refugia.

Climate change has driven contemporary decline and loss of kelp forests globally with an accompanying loss of their ecological and economic values. Kelp populations at equatorward-range edges are particularly vulnerable to climate change as these locations are undergoing warming at or beyond thermal tolerance thresholds. Concerningly, these range-edge populations may contain unique adaptive or evolutionary genetic diversity that is vulnerable to warming.

Tracking widespread climate-driven change on temperate and tropical reefs.

Warming seas, marine heatwaves, and habitat degradation are increasingly widespread phenomena affecting marine biodiversity, yet our understanding of their broader impacts is largely derived from collective insights from independent localized studies. Insufficient systematic broadscale monitoring limits our understanding of the true extent of these impacts and our capacity to track these at scales relevant to national policies and international agreements. Using an extensive time series of co-located reef fish community structure and habitat data spanning 12 years and the entire Australian continent, we found that reef fish community responses to changing temperatures and habitats are dynamic and widespread but regionally patchy.

Illegal recreational fishing causes a decline in a fishery targeted species (Snapper: Chrysophrys auratus) within a remote no-take marine protected area.

One role of Marine Protected Areas is to protect biodiversity; however, illegal fishing activity can reduce the effectiveness of protection. Quantifying illegal fishing effort within no-take MPAs is difficult and the impacts of illegal fishing on biodiversity are poorly understood. To provide an assessment of illegal fishing activity, a surveillance camera was deployed at the Seal Rocks no-take area within the Port Stephens-Great Lakes Marine Park from April 2017-March 2018.

Corrigendum: Assessing National Biodiversity Trends for Rocky and Coral Reefs through the Integration of Citizen Science and Scientific Monitoring Programs.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biw180.].

Assessing National Biodiversity Trends for Rocky and Coral Reefs through the Integration of Citizen Science and Scientific Monitoring Programs.

Reporting progress against targets for international biodiversity agreements is hindered by a shortage of suitable biodiversity data. We describe a cost-effective system involving Reef Life Survey citizen scientists in the systematic collection of quantitative data covering multiple phyla that can underpin numerous marine biodiversity indicators at high spatial and temporal resolution. We then summarize the findings of a continental- and decadal-scale State of the Environment assessment for rocky and coral reefs based on indicators of ecosystem state relating to fishing, ocean warming, and invasive species and describing the distribution of threatened species.