Social-environmental drivers inform strategic management of coral reefs in the Anthropocene.

Without drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate globalized stressors, tropical coral reefs are in jeopardy. Strategic conservation and management requires identification of the environmental and socioeconomic factors driving the persistence of scleractinian coral assemblages-the foundation species of coral reef ecosystems. Here, we compiled coral abundance data from 2,584 Indo-Pacific reefs to evaluate the influence of 21 climate, social and environmental drivers on the ecology of reef coral assemblages.

A simple function for full-subsets multiple regression in ecology with R.

Full-subsets information theoretic approaches are becoming an increasingly popular tool for exploring predictive power and variable importance where a wide range of candidate predictors are being considered. Here, we describe a simple function in the statistical programming language R that can be used to construct, fit, and compare a complete model set of possible ecological or environmental predictors, given a response variable of interest and a starting generalized additive (mixed) model fit. Main advantages include not requiring a complete model to be fit as the starting point for candidate model set construction (meaning that a greater number of predictors can potentially be explored than might be available through functions such as dredge); model sets that include interactions between factors and continuous nonlinear predictors; and automatic removal of models with correlated predictors (based on a user defined criterion for exclusion).

Corals like it waxed: paraffin-based antifouling technology enhances coral spat survival.

The early post-settlement stage is the most sensitive during the life history of reef building corals. However, few studies have examined the factors that influence coral mortality during this period. Here, the impact of fouling on the survival of newly settled coral spat of Acropora millepora was investigated by manipulating the extent of fouling cover on settlement tiles using non-toxic, wax antifouling coatings.

Bleaching response of Symbiodinium (zooxanthellae): determination by flow cytometry.

Coral bleaching is of increasing concern to reef management and stakeholders. Thus far, quantification of coral bleaching tends to be heavily reliant on the enumeration of zooxanthellae, with less emphasis on assessment of photosynthetic or physiological condition, these being often assessed separately by techniques such as liquid chromatography. Traditional methods of enumeration using microscopy are time consuming, subjected to low precision and great observer error.