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This project used climate models to produce projections of increases in sea temperatures for coral reef areas in Micronesia and abroad. The results suggest that projected sea temperature increases will cause coral bleaching to occur annually in Guam and CNMI by the early 2040s, if current greenhouse gas emissions growth continues. Coral reefs are expected to change dramatically once severe bleaching occurs annually, resulting in loss of biodiversity and ecosystem goods and services. Reefs in Micronesia would have at least a decade more time to adapt or acclimate to climate change if the emissions reductions pledges made under the Paris Agreement become reality. Importantly, the projections reveal that coral reef...
Projections of climate change impacts on coral reefs produced at the coarse resolution (~1°) of Global Climate Models (GCMs) have informed debate but have not helped target local management actions. Here, projections of the onset of annual coral bleaching conditions in the Caribbean under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 are produced using an ensemble of 33 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase-5 models and via dynamical and statistical downscaling. A high-resolution (~11 km) regional ocean model (MOM4.1) is used for the dynamical downscaling. For statistical downscaling, sea surface temperature (SST) means and annual cycles in all the GCMs are replaced with observed data from the ~4-km NOAA...
Abstract (from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320715300926): Ecological resilience assessments are an important part of resilience-based management (RBM) and can help prioritize and target management actions. Use of such assessments has been limited due to a lack of clear guidance on the assessment process. This study builds on the latest scientific advances in RBM to provide that guidance from a resilience assessment undertaken in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). We assessed spatial variation in ecological resilience potential at 78 forereef sites near the populated islands of the CNMI: Saipan, Tinian/Aguijan, and Rota. The assessments are based on measuring indicators...
Climate-change impacts on coral reefs are expected to include temperature-induced spatially extensive bleaching events1. Bleaching causes mortality when temperature stress persists but exposure to bleaching conditions is not expected to be spatially uniform at the regional or global scale2. Here we show the first maps of global projections of bleaching conditions based on ensembles of IPCC AR5 (ref. 3) models forced with the new Representative Concentration Pathways4 (RCPs). For the three RCPs with larger CO2 emissions (RCP 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5) the onset of annual bleaching conditions is associated with ∼ 510 ppm CO2 equivalent; the median year of all locations is 2040 for the fossil-fuel aggressive RCP 8.5. Spatial...
Coral reefs and the services they provide are seriously threatened by ocean acidification and climate change impacts like coral bleaching. Here, we present updated global projections for these key threats to coral reefs based on ensembles of IPCC AR5 climate models using the new Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) experiments. For all tropical reef locations, we project absolute and percentage changes in aragonite saturation state (Ωarag) for the period between 2006 and the onset of annual severe bleaching (thermal stress >8 degree heating weeks); a point at which it is difficult to believe reefs can persist as we know them. Severe annual bleaching is projected to start 10–15 years later at high-latitude...