OPTIMISATION OF REEF SURVEY METHODS AND APPLICATION OF REEF METRICS AND BIOCRITERIA FOR THE MONITORING OF SEDIMENT-IMPACTED REEFS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Blue Carbon Science, Management and Policy Across a Tropical Urban Landscape

The ability of vegetated coastal ecosystems to sequester high rates of “blue” carbon over millennial time scales has attracted the interest of national and international policy makers as a tool for climate change mitigation. Whereas focus on blue carbon conservation has been mostly on threatened rural seascapes, there is scope to consider blue carbon dynamics along highly fragmented and developed urban coastlines. The tropical city state of Singapore is used as a case study of urban blue carbon knowledge generation, how blue carbon changes over time with urban development, and how such knowledge can be integrated into urban planning alongside municipal and national climate change obligations. A systematic review of blue carbon studies in Singapore was used to support a qualitative review of Singapore’s blue carbon ecosystems, carbon budget, changes through time and urban planning and policy. Habitat loss across all blue carbon ecosystems is coarsely estimated to have resulted in the release of ∼12.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the 20th century. However, Singapore’s remaining blue carbon ecosystems still store an estimated 568,971 – 577,227 tonnes of carbon (equivalent to 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide) nationally, with a small proportion of initial loss offset by habitat restoration. Carbon is now a key topic on the urban development and planning agenda, as well as nationally through Singapore’s contributions to the Paris Agreement. The experiences of Singapore show that coastal ecosystems and their blue carbon stocks can be successfully managed along an urban coastline, and can help inform blue carbon science and management along other rapidly urbanizing coastlines throughout the tropics

An Indo-Pacifc coral spawning database

The discovery of multi-species synchronous spawning of scleractinian corals on the Great Barrier Reef in the 1980s stimulated an extraordinary effort to document spawning times in other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, most of these data remain unpublished which limits our understanding of regional and global reproductive patterns. The Coral Spawning Database (CSD) collates much of these disparate data into a single place. The CSD includes 6178 observations (3085 of which were unpublished) of the time or day of spawning for over 300 scleractinian species in 61 genera from 101 sites in the Indo-Pacific. The goal of the CSD is to provide open access to coral spawning data to accelerate our understanding of coral reproductive biology and to provide a baseline against which to evaluate any future changes in reproductive phenology

Status and Trends of East Asian Coral Reefs: 1983–2019

JapanGlobal Coral Reef Monitoring Network, East Asia Regio

Environmental DNA detection of the invasive mussel Mytella strigata as a surveillance tool

10.3391/mbi.2021.12.3.05Management of Biological Invasions123578-59

MOLECULAR AND ANATOMICAL ANALYSES REVEAL THAT PERONIA VERRUCULATA (GASTROPODA: ONCHIDIIDAE) IS A CRYPTIC SPECIES COMPLEX

10.1163/18759866-08703002873149-16

Effects of eutrophication on the planktonic food web dynamics of marine coastal ecosystems: The case study of two tropical inlets

13 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix supplementary data https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marenvres.2016.06.005.-- This work is a contribution to the consolidated research group 2014 SGR 498 of the Generalitat de CatalunyaWe studied the plankton dynamics of two semi-enclosed marine coastal inlets of the north of Jurong Island separated by a causeway (SW Singapore; May 2012–April 2013). The west side of the causeway (west station) has residence times of ca. one year and is markedly eutrophic. The east side (east station) has residence times of one month and presents lower nutrient concentrations throughout the year. The higher nutrient concentrations at the west station did not translate into significantly higher concentrations of chlorophyll a, with the exception of some peaks at the end of the South West Monsoon. Microzooplankton were more abundant at the west station. The west station exhibited more variable abundances of copepods during the year than did the east station, which showed a more stable pattern and higher diversity. Despite the higher nutrient concentrations at the west station (never limiting phytoplankton growth), the instantaneous phytoplankton growth rates there were generally lower than at the east station. The phytoplankton communities at the west station were top-down controlled, largely by microzooplankton grazing, whereas those of the east station alternated between top-down and bottom-up control, with mesozooplankton being the major grazers. Overall, the trophic transfer efficiency from nutrients to mesozooplankton in the eutrophic west station was less efficient than in the east station, but this was mostly because a poor use of inorganic nutrients by phytoplankton rather than an inefficient trophic transfer of carbon. Some hypotheses explaining this result are discussedThis work was funded through grant MadeInPlankton from Singapore National Parks Board – Singapore (NParks) and from DHI-NTU Research Centre and Education Hub Ung EliteForsk Grants10-093759 and 10-094773 from the Danish Ministry for Independent Research to GD, and Projects PROTOS (CTM2009-08783), TOPCOP (CTM2011-23480) and FERMI (CGL2014-59227-R) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to AC.Peer Reviewe

Comparing patterns of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity in reef coral communities

10.1007/s00338-018-1698-6Coral Reefs373737–75

A preliminary investigation of epibiotic macrofauna on the mangrove horseshoe crab Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda (Latreille, 1802) in Singapore

10.1080/17451000.2021.1986723Marine Biology Research1705-06513-52

Data from: Beyond the Coral Triangle: high genetic diversity and near panmixia in Singapore's populations of the broadcast spawning sea star Protoreaster nodosus

The Coral Triangle is widely considered the most important centre of marine biodiversity in Asia while areas on its periphery such as the South China Sea, have received much less interest. Here, we demonstrate that a small population of the knobbly sea star Protoreaster nodosus in Singapore has similarly high levels of genetic diversity as comparable Indonesian populations from the Coral Triangle. The high genetic diversity of this population is remarkable because it is maintained despite decades of continued anthropogenic disturbance. We postulate that it is probably due to broadcast spawning which is likely to maintain high levels of population connectivity. To test this, we analysed 6140 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) loci for Singapore's populations and demonstrate a pattern of near panmixia. We here document a second case of high genetic diversity and low genetic structure for a broadcast spawner in Singapore, which suggests that such species have high resilience against anthropogenic disturbances. The study demonstrates the feasibility and power of using genome-wide SNPs for connectivity studies of marine invertebrates without a sequenced genome