Meeting Abstract
Over the past 30 years, large-scale coral die-offs throughout the Caribbean Sea have shifted reef communities to primarily weedy and stress-adapted coral taxa. For these degraded reefs, just as consequential as the continued impacts of acute bleaching events are the chronic, nonlethal effects of climate change that can influence community calcification and, in effect, the ecological role of coral reefs as productive ecosystem engineers. Many confounding factors have been shown to influence coral calcification across broad geographic ranges, leading to an incomplete picture of the extent to which climate change is impacting coral reef growth. Here, we apply a fully replicated and comprehensive sampling scheme of two widespread coral species, Siderastrea siderea and Pseudodiploria strigosa, across inner and outer reefs of three reef systems to characterize the environmental factors controlling coral growth rates in the western Caribbean and Florida Keys. Growth histories reveal that on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System (MBRS) in Belize and the Bocas del Toro Reef Complex (BTRC) in Panama, both species have experienced recent downturns in growth rates; however, on the Florida Keys Reef Tract (FKRT), they have largely maintained baseline growth rates over this same interval. We find that these recent patterns in growth are associated principally with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, particularly in the higher latitude reef systems (FKRT and MBRS). Additionally, baseline growth of S. siderea is significantly correlated with water column turbidity, but no such relationship for P. strigosa is observed.
