Project 5.2 'Experimental and field investigations of combined water quality and climate effects on corals and other reef organisms'

Led by: Dr. Sven Uthicke, Australian Institute of Marine Science

The objective of this project is to assess how management of local stressors such as land runoff can help improve the resilience of coral reefs to global stressors (climate change) which are more difficult to manage.

Increasing temperatures, ocean acidification (OA) and decreasing water quality from terrestrial runoff are likely to significantly alter ocean and coastal ecosystems over the next few decades. These issues have normally been considered as individual threats to tropical systems, but their interactions are as yet poorly understood and likely to be more damaging than the threats in isolation.

Project objectives at a glance

Experimentally quantify changes in the thresholds for global change stressors (temperature increase, ocean acidification) due to elevated local stressors, (increased nutrients, increased turbidity, decreased salinity) on key coral reef organisms.
Care for the next generation by investigating individual and synergistic effects of water quality and global change on reproduction, larval development and settlement of key coral reef invertebrates (e.g. corals, echinoderms).
Predict the future performance of reef organisms by experimentally testing hypotheses about differences in the vulnerability of coral species to ocean acidification, as derived from our studies of natural CO₂ seeps.
Use inshore reefs as a model system to investigate the performance of calcifying organisms at low or variable carbonate saturation state.

Specific objectives and intended outputs of this Project are detailed in the NERP TE Hub Multi-Year Research Plan.

Project Factsheet

Technical Reports

Report on dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and total alkalinity (TA) concentrations on 14 MMP sites comparing one dry-and one wet-season