Incorporating environmental and climate drivers into coral reef community dynamics
The three stand-alone analytical projects that comprise this overall project are detailed below: 1) Linking in situ temperature time series and benthic survey data to assess coral reef bleaching resilience in American Samoa: Results from ESD's FY19 vertic...
Movement and retention of derelict fishing nets in Northwestern Hawaiian Island reefs
Derelict fishing nets pose hazards to marine systems as they travel through the ocean or become ensnared on coral reefs. Understanding of the movement of nets within shallow atolls can help to optimize operations to protect these shallow reefs. In 2018, s...
Oceanic productivity and high-frequency temperature variability—not human habitation—supports calcifier abundance on central Pacific coral reefs
Past research has demonstrated how local-scale human impacts—including reduced water quality, overfishing, and eutrophication—adversely affect coral reefs. More recently, global-scale shifts in ocean conditions arising from climate change have been shown ...
Status and Trends Assessment for Land-based Sources of Pollution Impacts on Benthic Reef Communities in Faga‘alu Bay, American Samoa
This report provides a summary of key findings for work completed between 2012 and 2020 to assess the effectiveness of management actions conducted at the Samoa Maritime quarry in Faga‘alu, American Samoa. Collectively, these data offer a contrast between...
Ecological and environmental predictors of juvenile coral density across the central and western Pacific
The persistence of Pacific coral reefs is threatened by large-scale mortality resulting from heat stress, storms, overfishing, disease, and land-based pollution. While reefs have demonstrated the ability to recover from these disturbances, recovery potent...
Status and Trends Assessment of Benthic Coral Reef Communities in Vatia Bay, American Samoa, 2015–2020
This report provides a summary of key findings for work completed in 2015 and 2020 to assess the status and trends of the benthic coral reef communities in Vatia Bay, American Samoa. Collectively, these data offer a contrast between the 2015 baseline asse...
Study design and analytical guidance for assessing restoration success following vessel groundings on coral reefs
This guide aims to educate organizations—including natural resource agencies—on the proper study design and analytical framework to implement when a vessel runs aground on a coral reef to enable evaluating restoration success over time.
Vogetrader Long-Term Monitoring 12 years After Impact: a collection of benthic data and imagery collected in 2022 to evaluate reef recovery and the efficacy of restoration efforts at the M/V VogeTrader grounding site in O'ahu, Hawai'i (NCEI Accession 0282702)
On February 5, 2010, the cargo vessel M/V Vogetrader ran aground a shallow forereef in Oahu, Hawaii. In response to the loss of natural resources, three restoration techniques were implemented in 2013: coral outplanting, rubble removal, and passive restor...
CRCP-Comparative status of extant Acropora cervicornis
This project was funded for two years by CRCP (FY13-14) and built upon one year of pilot work conducted in FY12 funded by NMFS-SEFSC and SERO as an NRC postdoctoral research fellowship (Huntington). The goals of the project were to characterize natural, r...
Staghorn survey and bioassays to test for improved condition in thickets to guide restoration efforts
Based on our 2012 monitoring of several extant populations of A. cervicornis in the Caribbean (Huntington and Miller in prep), we hypothesized that A. cervicornis growth rates and tissue condition are enhanced when very dense spatial configurations (i.e. ...
Incorporating environmental and climate drivers into coral reef community dynamics
Vogetrader Long-Term Monitoring 12 years After Impact: a collection of benthic data and imagery collected in 2022 to evaluate reef recovery and the efficacy of restoration efforts at the M/V VogeTrader grounding site in O'ahu, Hawai'i (NCEI Accession 0282702)
This project was funded for two years by CRCP (FY13-14) and built upon one year of pilot work conducted in FY12 funded by NMFS-SEFSC and SERO as an NRC postdoctoral research fellowship (Huntington). The goals of the project were to characterize natural, r...