UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar

Kevin Gross

Biomathematics Program, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University

Stability of Caribbean coral-reef communities quantified by long-term monitoring and autoregressive models

Abstract

Tropical coral reefs exemplify ecosystems imperiled by environmental change. Anticipating the future of reef ecosystems requires understanding how scleractinian corals respond to the multiple environmental disturbances that threaten their survival. In this talk, I will present an attempt to characterize the stability of coral reefs at three habitats along the south shore of St. John, US Virgin Islands, using multivariate autoregression models and two decades of monitoring data. The analysis quantified several measures of ecosystem stability, including the magnitude of typical stochastic fluctuations, the rate of recovery following disturbance, and the sensitivity of coral cover to hurricanes and elevated sea temperature. Our results suggest that, even within a ~4 km shore, coral communities in different habitats display different stability properties, and that the stability of each habitat corresponds with the habitat’s known synecology. Technical aspects of the presentation will emphasize the unique mathematics of compositional data, and the challenges of characterizing the dynamical properties of slowly changing ecosystems. This is joint work with Peter Edmunds of CSU-Northridge.



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