A reef manager's guide to coral bleaching

Scientists agree that tropical seas will continue to warm over coming decades, increasing both the probability and severity of mass bleaching events8-11. These scenarios pose particular challenges to coral reef managers, not the least because the main cause of mass coral bleaching–anomalously warm sea temperatures–is largely beyond their control.Yet, managers can play a critical role in helping reefs survive the threat of coral bleaching. Managers are in a unique position to increase our understanding of the phenomenon of coral bleaching, to take meaningful action during a bleaching event, and to develop strategies to support the natural resilience of reefs in the face of long-term changes in climate. Because of increasingly strong collaborations between reef managers and scientists, strategies are being developed to directly address the threat of coral bleaching. Management needs and preliminary strategies were first documented in 2000, when the IUCN published Management of Bleached and Severely Damaged Coral Reefs12. In 2002, the US Coral Reef Task Force called for a collaborative effort to identify actions local managers could take to address the impacts of climate change and mass bleaching on coral reefs. In response, three US government agencies (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior) convened an international workshop entitled 'Coral Reefs, Climate Change and Coral Bleaching' in June 2003. This workshop significantly advanced thinking about the strategies that could support managers in their efforts to respond to coral bleaching

Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment

The combination of sensitivity and exposure to climate change render the GBR ecosystem highly vulnerable to climate change. While the components and processes that comprise the ecosystem vary in their vulnerability, the implications of climate change are far-reaching and, in many cases, severe. Overall, the GBR ecosystem has features that will afford it some protection from climate change compared with tropical marine reef ecosystems. These features include its immense size, its location adjacent to a relatively sparsely populated and developed country, and its protection under a management regime that is recognised as the best in the world. However, coral reefs are one of the most vulnerable of all of the earth’s ecosystems to climate change, and the GBR will continue to be affected. Even under the most optimistic climate change scenarios, the GBR is destined for significant change over this century; under pessimistic scenarios, catastrophic impacts are possible. In this section, we provide an overview of the exposure of the GBR to climate factors, including a summary of predicted changes to the GBR climate, followed by a review of the reasons for the sensitivity of the GBR to climate change. We then provide a synopsis of current and emerging knowledge about the vulnerability of GBR species groups and habitats to climate change.This is Chapter 24 of Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment. The entire book can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11017/137 ID: 7

Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment

The Great Barrier Reef is renowned internationally for its ecological importance and the beauty of its seascapes and landscapes. These natural values also provide important ecosystem services, which underpin Australian $6.9 billion worth of economic activity and incalculable social values. In combination, the social-ecological system centred on the reef is extraordinary in its importance, and in its complexity. Understanding the vulnerability of such a large and intricate system to climate change is a particularly difficult challenge. A first step in meeting this challenge is to describe the general characteristics of the system and the environment in which they interact. Toward this end, this chapter introduces the Great Barrier Reef and the human systems that interact with it, providing a context for the detailed chapters that follow.This is Chapter 1 of Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment. The entire book can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11017/13

Biophysical assessment of reefs in Keppel Bay: a baseline study (April 2007)

The Keppel Islands are a group of 16 continental islands lying 18 km off the coastal town of Yeppoon in the southern Great Barrier Reef. Located in the shallow basin to the north of Keppel Bay, the islands are host to a patchwork of fringing reefs in various forms of development. Coral communities are abundant in some locations, and coral cover is high (60 to 70%) relative to the average at sites surveyed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s Long-Term Monitoring Program (~35%), and are often dominated by extensive stands of branching Acropora that extend into shallow water. These ‘staghorn’ corals are vulnerable to impacts caused by environmental stresses such as elevated sea temperature (causing coral bleaching events), degraded water quality (associated with hyposaline floods events) and physical damage (from cyclones, storms and anchoring). The Fitzroy River, one of the largest catchments in Queensland, is about 40 km to the south of the Keppel Islands. Large flood plumes occur approximately every 10 years, and the soft riverine sediments are regularly re-suspended in the shallow bay by wind and tide action causing high turbidity. Heavy rainfall also affects the shallow reef flat habitats, with reported incidences of coral mortality caused by heavy rain at times of extreme low tidesID: 176

The Poisson bracket compatible with the classical reflection equation algebra

We introduce a family of compatible Poisson brackets on the space of $2\times 2$ polynomial matrices, which contains the reflection equation algebra bracket. Then we use it to derive a multi-Hamiltonian structure for a set of integrable systems that includes the $XXX$ Heisenberg magnet with boundary conditions, the generalized Toda lattices and the Kowalevski top.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX with AmsFont

Feature Neighbourhood Mutual Information for multi-modal image registration: An application to eye fundus imaging

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Multi-modal image registration is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for medical diagnosis and treatment. The combination of different image modalities facilitates much greater understanding of the underlying condition, resulting in improved patient care. Mutual Information is a popular image similarity measure for performing multi-modal image registration. However, it is recognised that there are limitations with the technique that can compromise the accuracy of the registration, such as the lack of spatial information that is accounted for by the similarity measure. In this paper, we present a two-stage non-rigid registration process using a novel similarity measure, Feature Neighbourhood Mutual Information. The similarity measure efficiently incorporates both spatial and structural image properties that are not traditionally considered by MI. By incorporating such features, we find that this method is capable of achieving much greater registration accuracy when compared to existing methods, whilst also achieving efficient computational runtime. To demonstrate our method, we use a challenging medical image data set consisting of paired retinal fundus photographs and confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope images. Accurate registration of these image pairs facilitates improved clinical diagnosis, and can be used for the early detection and prevention of glaucoma disease

Come back Marshall, all is forgiven? : Complexity, evolution, mathematics and Marshallian exceptionalism

Marshall was the great synthesiser of neoclassical economics. Yet with his qualified assumption of self-interest, his emphasis on variation in economic evolution and his cautious attitude to the use of mathematics, Marshall differs fundamentally from other leading neoclassical contemporaries. Metaphors inspire more specific analogies and ontological assumptions, and Marshall used the guiding metaphor of Spencerian evolution. But unfortunately, the further development of a Marshallian evolutionary approach was undermined in part by theoretical problems within Spencer's theory. Yet some things can be salvaged from the Marshallian evolutionary vision. They may even be placed in a more viable Darwinian framework.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Evolution of the pairing pseudogap in the spectral function with interplane anisotropy

We study the pairing pseudogap in the spectral function as a function of interplane coupling. The analytical expressions for the self-energy in the critical regime are obtained for any degree of anisotropy. The frequency dependence of the self-energy is found to be qualitatively different in two and three dimensions, and the crossover from two to three dimensional behavior is discussed. In particular, by considering the anisotropy of the Fermi velocity and gap along the Fermi surface, we can qualitatively explain recent photoemission experiments on high temperature superconductors concerning the temperature dependent Fermi arcs seen in the pseudogap phase.Comment: 20 pages, revtex, 5 encapsulated postscript figures include

The protein-protein interactions required for assembly of the Tn3 resolution synapse

The site‐specific recombinase Tn3 resolvase initiates DNA strand exchange when two res recombination sites and six resolvase dimers interact to form a synapse. The detailed architecture of this intricate recombination machine remains unclear. We have clarified which of the potential dimer‐dimer interactions are required for synapsis and recombination, using a novel complementation strategy that exploits a previously uncharacterized resolvase from Bartonella bacilliformis (“Bart”). Tn3 and Bart resolvases recognize different DNA motifs, via diverged C‐terminal domains (CTDs). They also differ substantially at N‐terminal domain (NTD) surfaces involved in dimerization and synapse assembly. We designed NTD‐CTD hybrid proteins, and hybrid res sites containing both Tn3 and Bart dimer binding sites. Using these components in in vivo assays, we demonstrate that productive synapsis requires a specific “R ” interface involving resolvase NTDs at all three dimer‐binding sites in res . Synapses containing mixtures of wild‐type Tn3 and Bart resolvase NTD dimers are recombination‐defective, but activity can be restored by replacing patches of Tn3 resolvase R interface residues with Bart residues, or vice versa . We conclude that the Tn3 /Bart family synapse is assembled exclusively by R interactions between resolvase dimers, except for the one special dimer‐dimer interaction required for catalysis