CALL FOR ABSTRACTS ON CORAL REEFS AND ENVIRONMENTAL / CLIMATIC CHANGE AT ASLO 2011 (PUERTO RICO)
The 2011 Aquatic Sciences Meeting for the American Society for Limnology & oceanography (ASLO) will take place in Puerto Rico next February (13-18 February 2011) and focus on limnology and oceanography in a changing world (www.aslo.org/meetings/sanjuan2011). As part of 6 sessions proposed on corals and coral reefs, two will be dedicated to coral reefs and environmental/climatic change (S31 and S36, described in more detail below). Together these two sessions aim to explore the most recent developments in our understanding of how the environment (including anthropogenic activity and climate) regulates reef form and function, and consequently the likely future for coral reefs given predicted environmental and climatic change. Abstract submission is now open (www.aslo.org/meetings/sanjuan2011) and we welcome contributions from across the coral reef research, conservation & management communities. CLOSING DATE FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS IS 11 OCTOBER 2010. Please do not hesitate to contact the session conveners for more details. S36: INTERACTIVE AND REPEAT EXPOSURE EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PERTURBATIONS UPON CORALS AND CORAL REEF PROCESSES (David J Suggett, [email protected]; Andrea G Grottoli, [email protected]; Mark E. Warner, [email protected]). Coral reefs are considered flagship aquatic ecosystems given their disproportionately high diversity and productivity but also their apparent extreme sensitivity to environmental change. Intensive research efforts in recent years have largely focused on how reefs and reef organisms respond to broad scale (regional to global) changes in climate or smaller scale (local) changes in eutrophication, sedimentation, and over- exploitation. Most experimentally based studies have targeted the influence of individual environmental factors in isolation (e.g. light, temperature, pH, or nutrients). However, observationally based studies implicitly account for the influence of multiple environmental perturbations acting simultaneously and/or repeatedly. As such, our ability to effectively predict future reef form and function remain fundamentally limited. It is increasingly recognized that interactive or repeat exposure effects of environmental perturbations can (i) cumulatively lower net reef resilience by acting synergistically at any one time or repeatedly over time; and/or (ii) maintain or even promote net reef resilience by acting antagonistically by dampening the gross influence of each factor. Such key multivariate effects remain poorly understood. Therefore, this session will consider the net influence of multiple and/or repeat exposure to environmental perturbations upon reef process, at scales from individual organisms (the molecular to holobiont) to entire reef systems. S31: CORAL REEFS IN A CRYSTAL BALL: WHAT WILL BE THEIR FUTURE? (Pamela Hallock, [email protected]; Bernhard Riegl, [email protected]; Edwin A. Hernández-Delgado, [email protected]) In the mid-20th Century, coral reefs were best known where clear ocean waters bathed tropical shorelines. Today roughly half of the worlds shallow-water reefs have been lost or seriously degraded. Human activities are sending agricultural, industrial and urban wastes and chemicals, along with increased sediment loads, into coastal waters. As a result, waters have become more turbid and fringing reefs have been buried in sediment or overgrown by algae. Rapidly rising human populations have increasingly exploited fisheries, in some places with Malthusian overfishing. Beginning in the 1970s, even corals in clear-water offshore reefs began to decline from diseases and bleaching. More recently, increasing sea-surface temperature and ocean acidification have emerged as critical threats to the potential of corals to even build reefs. Do shallow-water coral reefs have a future? Will future coral populations be limited to shallow hardbottom or deeper mesophotic communities? Can ecological functions be sustained in changing coral reefs? We invite scientists dealing with any aspect of the response of coral reefs to environmental change, whether to local, regional or global change processes, to participate in this session. We invite not only coral researchers, but also others working with reef-related species, populations or communities, or environmental factors that may impact these communities.
