Category Archives: Coral Reefs

Could online maps save coral reefs?

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Reefs at Risk is a World Resources Institute project that analyses current threats to coral reefs worldwide. The original groundbreaking report, released in 1998, provided a critical look at the world’s coral reefs and human impacts – coastal zone development, overfishing, sedimentation.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veYBQAMBZT4&hl=en_US&fs=1&&w=480&h=385]

The next report, due this year (2010) is set to include a much more up to date analysis of global threats, including coral bleaching, disease and ocean acidification. This time, they are harnessing the power of Google Earth and Web 2.0:

Harnessing the power of interactive maps is Reefs at Risk Revisited, a conservation and research project headed by the World Resources Institute. It is in the process of updating its 1998 survey on the threats to the world’s coral reefs and central to the project is Google Earth.

The online map is being used to collect data from nearly 30 project partners, including WWF and Conservation International, and the final report will be freely available to the public.

People will be able to zoom around the world as they normally would, but instead of “flying” from their house to Pyongyang they will be able to almost literally dive into the reefs and discover the pressures on some of the world’s most delicate marine ecosystems.

Lauretta Burke who heads the project for the World Resources Institute is enthusiastic about the way in which interactive maps have enabled her team to gain more information and show it in an informative and engaging way.

“The new maps will be 64 times as detailed as the previous report,” she told CNN.

“The sharing of information has also improved [between research groups], which has allowed us to be aware of what has worked and how to replicate those success stories.”

More over at CNN (Hat-tip to Emily Beck).

Underwater lab the first to plot impact of climate change on reefs

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JO CHANDLER, The Age

May 24, 2010

Scientists from the University of Queensland set up equipment in the first experiement of its type in the world.ON AN idyllic coral atoll just a two-hour boat ride from Queensland’s Gladstone Harbour, out past the endless line of tankers queued to load coal for export, a half-dozen scientists work frantically against the tide.

Their objective? To explore the consequences of rising atmospheric carbon – which evidence overwhelmingly attributes to the burning of coal and other fossil fuels – on the delicate chemistry of the reef and the creatures living there.

The project team, led by David Kline, a young scientist from the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, is completing tests on a new underwater laboratory that will expose living corals on the Great Barrier Reef to the more acidic conditions forecast for oceans by the end of the century.

A Queensland University researcher tests the Barrier Reef laboratory that will expose corals to the more acidic conditions forcase for oceans by the end of the century.A Queensland University researcher tests the Barrier Reef laboratory that will expose corals to the more acidic conditions forcase for oceans by the end of the century.

The team has spent weeks working around the ebb and flow of tides, connecting four narrow, two-metre transparent chambers pegged over the reef shelf to the complex technology required to manage and monitor them. Small fish and currents move naturally through the porous structures, two of which will be constantly dosed with seawater flushed with carbon dioxide to lower the pH.

”This system here is the heart of the experiment,” Dr Kline explains to a film crew from the BBC natural history unit as he stands in the shallows, patting his hand on a floating platform loaded with pumps, cables and 50 instruments, all in constant conversation with ”the brains” – a computer program running in a laboratory a few metres away on shore.

International interest is high because this is the first in situinvestigation of its type. Findings from the Free Ocean Carbon Enrichment (FOCE) project will be keenly studied by scientists around the world.

Fathoming the effects of ocean acidification – the ”other” carbon problem, one that emerged in scientific literature only a decade ago – has become one of the most urgent issues on the science agenda. The potentially diabolical consequences were highlighted in major briefing papers presented last week by the United States National Research Council to the US Congress and by the European Science Foundation to national leaders. The papers appealed to governments to give the issue priority for investigation and action.

”The chemistry of the ocean is changing at an unprecedented rate and magnitude due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions,” the NRC has said. ”The rate of change exceeds any known to have occurred for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years.”

Ocean acidification occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolves in naturally alkaline seawater, forming weak carbonic acid. Studies show the world’s oceans have a huge appetite for carbon, and have insulated humanity from greenhouse warming by gulping in about one-third of the emissions pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

But the process lowers the overall pH of seawater – by about 30 per cent over the past 200 years. It also soaks up carbonate ions, which are crucial to marine organisms making their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons.

The Heron Island experiment assumes a future with seawater twice as acidic as today, a more conservative take than published business-as-usual scenarios, which put the increase at 150 per cent by 2100. The question scientists are racing to answer is what a more acidic environment will mean for the tiny shelled zooplankton on which the marine food chain depends, and for the skeletons corals build into reefs.

The fear, explains the director of the Global Change Institute and head of the Australian Research Council-funded research team, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, is that the change hits these creatures on two fronts – creating a more corrosive environment, and depleting stocks of building materials. ”If these organisms can’t compensate for that … reef growth will slow until the reef superstructure begins to crumble. If coral populations disappear you put at risk about a million or so species, and all of the beautiful benefits to humans such as fisheries, coastal protection, tourist industries and so on.”

Meanwhile, he says, reefs are struggling with the effects of rising temperatures, which can trigger bleaching – when the stressed coral hosts expel the microscopic algae on which they rely for survival. He likens simultaneous bleaching and acidification to ”having two rhinos run at you from different directions”. Maybe by some miracle you will escape, but the odds are not good.

”Ocean acidification is already occurring and will get worse,” said Professor Jelle Bijma, lead author of the European Science Foundation document, when it was presented last week. Combined with warming, ”we are in double trouble. The combination of the two may be the most critical environmental and economic challenge of the century”.

Dr Kline says some of his corals will be airbrushed to mimic bleaching, to see how damaged structures respond to the more acid environment. This will provide clues on whether reef atolls will continue to provide a platform for new communities to grow – ”or is the balance going to shift … are these massive reef structures going to end up dissolving?”

To date, exploration of these questions has been limited to laboratory aquaria. ”But seeing how they behave in the natural world is vital to gaining a reliable sense of where the future lies,” says Dr Kline. Ecosystems may turn out to be more resilient – or less – than the models show. ”Here in the world, the corals are surrounded by their natural community – you have natural water, natural light,” he explains, making final adjustments to the chambers.

They rest on layers of sands that have their own complex chemistry of carbonates and biota, which may help corals cope with a more acidic future.

”I’m hoping that these environments have some ability to buffer the impact of ocean acidification, and thereby part of the biodiversity of islands and coral reefs would be preserved,” says Dr Hoegh-Guldberg. ”But its 50:50. I actually think that what we are seeing in the laboratory is repeated in nature.”

The Queensland coalmines may be just over the horizon, but ”this is a big fat canary”, he says of the reef.

”Something as complex and broad a feature as coral reefs is now sickening and dying … This is really giving us a warning sign that maybe the whole basis of our dependence on this planet, the biological and ecological services, will change.”

Starck raving Reefgate?

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Just when you thought that all the ‘gates’ had rusted off their hinges, another one has blown open!

Welcome to “Reef Gate” as created by diving enthusiast Walter A Starck who has taken issue with GBRMPA scientist, Lawrence McCook, and 20 other leading marine scientists.  Dr. McCook and his colleagues published a scientific review of the impact of marine protected areas within the Great Barrier Reef which shows “major, rapid benefits of no-take areas for targeted fish and sharks, in both reef and non-reef habitats, with potential benefits for fisheries as well as biodiversity conservation.”

As background, Dr Walter Starck has spent a good deal of time diving on the Great Barrier Reef and regularly contributes to the highly compromised Institute of Public Affairs claiming that the Great Barrier Reef is in good shape and that concerns of scientists and reef managers otherwise are sensationalised and overblown.  While he has not published in a peer-reviewed scientific paper for over 30 years, Dr. Starck is a regular contributor to popular magazines including one, the Golden Dolphin,  which he edits and funds himself.

Starck also does not believe in anthropogenic climate change (see under his signature under “Science and Technology Experts Well Qualified in Climate Science” on an open letter UN Secretary General His Excellency Ban Ki Moon BUT DOES BELIEVE in ‘crop circles’ which many enthusiasts of his ilk believe are caused by extraterrestrials.

Walter Starck began the exchange on April 16 by addressing an open letter to Prof Russell Reichelt, Chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.  In his letter, Starck complained to Prof Reichelt that McCook et al. 2010 had not declared serious conflicts of interest arising from their employment and funding by GBRMPA. He also suggested that McCook et al. paper was slim on evidence and deliberately missed key evidence that would otherwise have told a different story about marine protected areas. Curiously, he did not reveal these other papers and data sets.

Not giving Prof Reichelt much time to reply, Dr Starck wrote two weeks later to Hon Min Peter Garrett to complain about GBRMPA’s failure to deal with the allegations.   This prompted a careful response in the form of a GBRMPA press release and letter of reply from Prof Russell Reichelt.

In his letter, Prof Reichelt carefully addresses each of Dr. Stark’s claims and makes a number of important points which lead to quite different conclusions to those of Dr Starck:

For example, Prof Reichelt points out that the paper by McCook et al has been reviewed and accepted by a prestigious international scientific journal. As with any publication in a leading journal, the McCook et al. paper would have had to go through rigorous and independent review. As part of this process, the paper’s data sources, methodologies and conclusions would have been scrutinized by 2-4 independent and anonymous expert reviewers. Given that GBRMPA had no control over the journal’s quality assurance process (the journal being no less than the Proceedings of the US Academy of Sciences!), the idea that GBRMPA would have been able to influence the paper such that  it would erroneously support GBRMPA’s desired position without the burden of evidence is, simply, far-fetched.

The second major point is that, contrary to Starck’s claims, McCook et al. 2010 did list their sources of support for the study. Among those listed were GBRMPA and the Pew Foundation.   Given that all authors had also clearly indicated their address and association with their employers, it doesn’t look like much of a cover-up! At this point, the claim of ‘serious misconduct’ seems a bit of a stretch at best!

The third major point that Prof Reichelt makes is that McCook et al is actually a review paper not a research report and hence builds on the results, methodologies and conclusions of many other papers (all listed at the back of the paper). That is, the claim by Dr Starck that McCook et al precariously rests on the conclusions of a single figure or data set is at odds with the actual contents of the paper.

In a reply to Prof Reichelt’s letter, Walter Starck tries unsuccessfully to keep the issue alive.   Further unsubstantiated accusations of cherry-picking and of misconduct follow – as well as claims that there was he was being prevented from accessing the data.  Again this is curious given that Dr. Starck makes this claim without having ever asked anyone for access to the data. As far as I understand, no one has any problem with him accessing the data.

Perhaps the greatest irony here is that Dr. Starck is well known for making claims about how great the health of the Great Barrier Reef is without a single shred of scientifically published evidence.  It seems that he has one standard for reef science and another one for the basis of his own conclusions about the Reef and, dare I say it, crop circles.  Perhaps if Dr Starck wishes his concerns to be taken seriously, he should publish his ideas through the peer-reviewed scientific literature rather than proffer unsubstantiated opinions and allegations that do little to further the otherwise careful science that has and is being done to understand and preserve our Great Barrier Reef.

Jeremy Jackson: “How We Wrecked the Ocean”

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Here’s a sobering presentation from the Jeremy Jackson (“Dr Doom”) titled “How We Wrecked the Ocean”. Like him or not, Jackson is a compelling speaker with a powerful message:

In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.

Jeremy Jackson is the Ritter Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Painting pictures of changing marine environments, particularly coral reefs and the Isthmus of Panama, Jackson’s research captures the extreme environmental decline of the oceans that has accelerated in the past 200 years.

Jackson’s current work focuses on the future of the world’s oceans, given overfishing, habitat destruction and ocean warming, which have fundamentally changed marine ecosystems and led to “the rise of slime.” Although Jackson’s work describes grim circumstances, even garnering him the nickname Dr. Doom, he believes that successful management and conservation strategies can renew the ocean’s health.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

There Once was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho

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http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11017386&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Here’s a fascinating documentary of a Pacific Island community in Papua New Guinea facing the reality of sea level rise and climate change:

Takuu atoll is an idyllic home to articulate, educated people who maintain a 1200 year-old culture and language with pride – but all is not well in paradise. Takuu is disintegrating and when two scientists arrive to investigate, the people realise their attempts to preserve the atoll are currently making the situation worse (more here).

Coral bleaching alert for the Western Indian Ocean

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The NOAA hotspot maps highlights regions where the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is currently warmer than the highest climatological monthly mean SST for that location. The HotSpot value of 1.0 °C is a threshold for thermal stress leading to coral bleaching. To highlight this threshold, HotSpot values below 1.0 °C are shown in purple, and HotSpots of 1.0 °C or greater range from yellow to red.

The CORDIO/IUCN working group on Climate Change and Coral Reefs have issued a bleaching alert for a moderate level of bleaching in the Seychelles:

The southeast monsoon in the WIO has set in early even before the end of march, dissipating the hotspot rapidly on the east African coast, but it persist over Seychelles granitic islands. No new or intensification of bleaching/mortality for East Africa though more may yet occur in Seychelles.

Field observations of bleaching and in some cases mortality have been reported in Kenya, Zanzibar, Madagascar & Comoros as follows, with more updates as we hear them:

Climate change skeptics ‘lack scientific credibility’

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The skeptics who frequently deny the reality of climate change in the world’s media lack all scientific credibility, charge three eminent Australian researchers who have just been listed among the world’s 20 most influential scientists in the field of climate change.

Marine researchers Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor Terry Hughes and Professor John Pandolfi were ranked in the world’s top 20 by the international science citation analysts Thomson Reuters and ScienceWatch, for the decade 1999-2009. All three are coral reef researchers, members of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS).

However, they warn, many self-proclaimed climate skeptics have never conducted any authentic climate research nor had it peer-reviewed by the world scientific community and published in respected journals.

The three researchers are urging the Australian and international media to be far more cautious in accepting views about climate change put by people whose work has not been subject to rigorous scientific scrutiny and peer-review – and to question the motives behind it.

Professors Hoegh-Guldberg, Hughes and Pandolfi (ranked 3, 7 and 17 in the world respectively) have published extensively in the world scientific literature, in particular on the impacts of climate change on the world’s coral reefs, fish and ocean ecosystems, and on the appropriate management responses to human-related climate change.

Collectively, their research papers on climate change have been cited by over 5000 other scientific publications, giving their work a powerful influence over the thinking of other researchers globally, who then cited it in their own peer-reviewed reports.

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland, is a co-author of the world’s most cited paper on climate change, the 2002 Nature report, “Ecological responses to recent climate change” (G.R. Walther et al., Nature 416: 389-95, 2002), which has now been cited about 1,100 times.

The US National Center for Atmospheric Research is ranked as the world’s most cited institution. Its most cited paper – the 2003 Science report, “Climate change, human impacts and the resilience of coral reefs“ – was co-authored by an international team including Professors Hughes, Hoegh-Guldberg and Pandolfi (T.P. Hughes et al., Science 302: 1503-1504, 2003)

“There are no climate skeptics among the coral reef science and management community, because we have seen first-hand the damage caused to reefs in response to the global warming that has already occurred. The evidence for man-made climate change is unequivocal,” says CoECRS director, Professor Hughes

“Our focus now is to move beyond the gloom, doom and denial, and look for practical solutions that will limit the damage from climate change.”

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said: “The evidence emerging from both ocean and atmospheric science makes it increasingly clear that humanity is going to have to get atmospheric CO2 levels back down to 350 parts per million or less, if we are to avoid major impacts on the planet and everything that lives on it.

“It is good that Australian science is playing a significant role in this global awakening – and Australians generally can support their science by demanding greater urgency and more action from their governments and political parties.”

CoECRS principal researcher Professor Pandolfi from The University of Queensland, said: “We are entering a new era in the history of environmental change on our planet: dramatic changes in climate coupled with massive degradation from overexploitation and pollution continue to threaten the foundations of many ecosystems.

“By showing that these linked threats are unprecedented in the Earth’s long history, we are drawing a line in the sand for immediate and substantial action to promote the rehabilitation and recovery of ecosystem goods and services.”

What coral is that? A practical way to learn coral identification.

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Distinguishing between the multitudes of different reef-building corals is a struggle that coral reef ecologists are well familiar with.  Fortunately, coral biologists such as Professor Charlie Veron have produced comprehensive taxonomic works designed to help decipher this important group of organisms. But these taxonomic treatises are by nature voluminous and are not designed to be taken underwater.

All that has changed now with Russell Kelley’s Indo Pacific Coral Finder.  Russell, a well-known biologist and communicator, has produced an ingenious guide which can easily be carried underwater and allow anyone to identify corals on the spot.  This is an enormously important tool for the biology and conservation of coral reefs.

For the diver / snorkeler interested in corals the Indo Pacific Coral Finder is unlike anything you may have seen or used before for coral identification.

In simple terms its a robust underwater book with a visually driven key that overcomes the variation in shape / form that corals show due to environment. After making a simple visual choice of a “Key Group” e.g. is it “branching”  and then answering a plain language question about scale or texture, the user is sent to a “Look-Alike” page with the top 5 or 6 best bets as to what the coral genus might be. Typically, the user then “sees” the answer because the eye and brain are very adept at separating similar things. By using visual cues and greatly reducing the reliance on text you are able to get the correct genus name of the coral. The Coral Finder then connects the end user directly with the relevant volume / page number in Charlie Veron’s Corals of the World and suddenly you are in the learning business!

The Coral Finder lets the early learner get a foothold where previously confusion reigned due to the bewildering number of species and their environmental variation. This tool offers a great opportunity for people to know their corals better. It captures around 70 genera (including the stony non-scleractinia) and works anywhere in the Indo-Pacific.  More advanced users will also find it a useful revision, learning and teaching tool. The Coral Finder is published by Russell Kelley and was supported by Dr Charlie Veron and the Australian Coral Reef Society. It is available from www.byoguides.com

These training movies give a sense of how the Coral Finder works.  You can find these movies here and here.

There is a supporting website of free audiovisual training resources (The Coral Hub) under construction by the Coral Identification Capacity Building Program and is due for release later this year.

Atrazine in Australian waters

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Atrazine is in the news again (e.g. ABC 7.30 Report Thursday 25th March, 60 Minutes, 21st March) and is being found in more and more water bodies in Australia, and notably Queensland in recent times.  Here is where it has been found so far:

  1. Rainwater at a few ng/l (unpublished data from Atherton, Qld), in streams in almost all of eastern Queensland at concentrations of between one and 50 ug/l (Lewis et al 2009; Packett et al 2009),
  2. Great Barrier Reef lagoon waters as far offshore as we have looked (outer reef waters) at ng/l concentrations (passive sampler work, Shaw et al 2010)
  3. Wet season discharge conditions in the lagoon at ug/l concentrations (Lewis et al 2009),
  4. Groundwater of the lower Burdekin at a few ug/l (as far back as 1976 (Brodie et al 1984) and
  5. Tap water in Rockhampton, Mackay, Ayr, Home Hill, Innisfail at 1 ug/l (unpublished and suppressed data)
  6. Noosa River associated with the infamous ‘two headed fish’, fish kills and human health problems (along with other pesticides) (Matt Landos’s work),
  7. Victorian tap water and in streams in Tasmania.

You might say this isn’t ‘everywhere’ but that’s only because we haven’t looked ‘everywhere’. Everywhere we have looked we have found it.

All I can say is that obviously current management (i.e. APVMA federally) is not working. Given this failure of management the only solution left is to ban atrazine. This is unfortunate for farmers as atrazine is a valuable product and possibly could be kept in use if there was a competent management regime. The part on the 7.30 Report story where APVMA notes that atrazine use was banned along watercourses says it all. This will have no effect in losses from sugar application where atrazine leaks from sugarcane via drainage (sugarcane is always drained due to dislike of wet roots) and is not used in watercourses anyhow!

This is the telling point against APVMA as their review (2008) does nothing whatsoever to reduce loss of atrazine from sugarcane crops. So a review that took 13 years produced no actions which had any effect on losses from sugarcane (and I suspect other crops as well), yet the problems of loss from sugarcane were well known by then and published in the open scientific literature.

Meanwhile APVMA continues to ignore the evidence and cannot provide a satisfactory management regime for these pesticides to keep them out of our waterways. Currently the role and scope for action of APVMA is being reviewed but it unlikely any major changes to make APVMA more effective will occur.

John McLean still manipulating data

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Still waiting for John McLean and Bob Carter to comment on the Foster et al response published in JGR outlining exactly how they manipulated their dataset to give a false conclusion. According to McLean’s website, although the authors were well aware of the Foster response before it was published:

The informal nature of the Foster et al critique makes it inappropriate for me to respond in detail.

Right. Apparently the long delay between the original McLean et al publication and the Foster et al critique was in part due to the fact that the McClean et al were invited to respond to the critique prior to it being published in JGR, but ultimately declined.

So, while we wait for a formal response, here’s another lie from McLean’s own homepage: sea surface temperatures (SST’s) along the Great Barrier Reef are not increasing. In recent times, climate scientists have been blasted for using ultra-secret ‘tricks‘ to manipulate their data. It seems that McLean has gone one up on this in his analysis of SST’s, using statistical averaging to hide the any possible trends:

The data is in form of values for grid cells of 1 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude.  From it I extracted the data applying to the GBR Marine Park and calculated the average across the park for each month.

The GBR covers over 200,000km2, from 11’S to 24’S. By averaging surface temperatures across the entire region, McLean effectively destroys any warming trend, and presents the data as an average, with no indication of error or confidence intervals. In fact, here’s how spatially variable SST across the entire GBR Marine Park really can be (from Lough 1994):

Here it is again, this time using SST’s over the past 105 yrs (De’ath et al 2009):

Considering the seemingly obvious with latitudinal temperature gradients, why did McLean ignore spatial variability in SST’s and reach the conclusion that sea surface temperature isn’t increasing on the GBR?

These graphs make it abundantly clear that the sea surface temperature along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are not increasing at an alarming rate. The people who say otherwise have no evidence whatsoever to support their claims. These sea temperatures might rise in future but the historical evidence suggests that this will most likely be due to the natural forces of El Nino events.

In case you missed it, here it is again: “The people who say otherwise have no evidence whatsoever to support their claims“. Really? Instead of relying on website science*, let’s go to the published literature. Using mean annual sea surface temperature (SST) records were obtained from the HadISST1 for 1° grid cells, between 1900 to 2006, De’ath et al (2009) found clear temporal trends across 2° latitudinal bands:

We’ve tried replicating the results from McLean’s website results, but the methodology is (deliberately?) vague. Considering John McLean is an employee of “Applied Science Consultants” in Victoria, Australia, we can’t bombard him with FOI requests to show us his methods and data, so it seems only fair to ask McLean to be a little more transparent in his analysis. Otherwise, the conclusion that “.. people who say otherwise have no evidence whatsoever to support their claims” seems particularly disingenuous. Should we expect a retraction on McLean’s behalf? As David Horton pointed out the other day: “This was never a scientific debate, always an ideological one, or, rather, it was always science versus ideology.”