Constantine Alexander's blog

Rare glimpse into the origin of species

Plant overcomes infertility to give rise to a new species in Scotland

		This is a close-up of the new species of monkeyflower, Mimulus peregrinus. Credit: Mario Vallejo-Marin

A new species of monkey flower, created by the union of two foreign plant species, has been discovered on the bank of a stream in Scotland. Genetic changes in this attractive yellow-flowered hybrid have allowed it to overcome infertility and made it a rare example of a brand new species that has originated in the wild in the last 150 years. Thousands of wild species and some crops are thought to have originated in this way, yet only a handful of examples exist where this type of species formation has occurred in recent history.

The ancestors of the new plant were brought from the Americas as botanical curiosities in the 1800s and were quickly adopted by Victorian gardeners. Soon after their arrival, they escaped the confines of British gardens and can now be found growing in the wild, along the banks of rivers and streams. Reproduction between these species produces hybrids that are now widespread in Britain. Yet, genetic differences between the two parents mean that the hybrids are infertile and cannot go beyond the first generation.

		This shows British monkey flowers: North and South American parents (A = M. guttatus (yellow monkey flower); B = M. luteus (blood-drop emlets)), the sterile hybrid (C), and the new species (D). Scale bar = 1cm. Credit: Mario Vallejo-Marin

Dr Mario Vallejo-Marin, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Stirling, has documented the first examples of hybrid monkey flowers that have overcome these genetic barriers and show fully restored fertility. This fertile hybrid derived from 'immigrant' parents represents a new species, native to Scotland. Dr Vallejo-Marin has chosen to name this species Mimulus peregrinus, which translates as 'the wanderer'. The species is described in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

		This shows the habitat of the new species in southern Scotland. Credit: Mario Vallejo-Marin

'The two American monkey flowers are unable to produce fertile hybrids due to differences in the amount of DNA present in each species, the equivalent of getting a sterile mule from crossing a horse and a donkey', said Dr. Vallejo-Marin. 'However, in rare cases, duplication of the entire hybrid DNA, known as polyploidization, can balance the amount of DNA and restore fertility. Our studies suggest that this is what has happened here.'

The discovery will help scientists to understand how new species form. It is thought that many existing plant species including crops such as wheat, cotton and tobacco may have originated in a similar way, but finding examples of this process in action is rare. 'This is an exciting opportunity to study evolution as it happens,' said Vallejo Marin. 'We do not yet know how common the new species is or how well it will fare, so the next step will be to find out its distribution and whether its ecological characteristics, allow it to colonise environments that cannot be currently exploited by its parents.'

Reference: Vallejo-Marín M (2012) Mimulus peregrinus (Phrymaceae): A new British allopolyploid species. PhytoKeys 14: 1-14. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.14.3305

Contact: Dr. Mario Vallejo-Marin
mario.vallejo@stir.ac.uk
44-017-864-67822
Pensoft Publishers

'We can still save our reefs:' Coral scientist

Professor John Pandolfi

John Pandolfi keeps his optimism alive despite the grim scientific evidence he confronts daily that the world's coral reefs are in a lot of trouble – along with 81 nations and 500 million people who depend on them.

The world-renowned coral scientist from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and University of Queensland has traced the story of the world's reefs over more than 50 million years and is deciphering delicate signals from the past to reveal what doomed them in previous extinctions – and how this compares with today.

This knowledge is priceless in understanding what we humans have to do to prevent such a tragedy recurring, he says.

"I'm an optimist – you have to be, to devote your life to this field," he explains. Despite scientific predictions that the current trajectory of human development will eliminate 90 per cent of the world's coral reefs by the end of the century, Pandolfi considers it is still within our power to save 60 or70 per cent, provided we act quickly to limit the things that drive corals to ruin.

"Corals themselves are remarkably resilient. They have stood up to several episodes of global warming and high CO2 in the past – and bounced back, even from mass extinction events.

But the sobering fact is that it can take coral reefs up to ten million years to re-establish after a major extinction event, he says. "That's a long time to wait if your industries, communities and food supplies are dependent on reefs."

The big issue today is that most of the world's coral reefs face a 'double whammy' of accelerated global change combined with local stresses from pollution, runoff and overfishing. These local, man-made, factors were absent during previous world coral crises, he points out.

"Also, while corals have withstood hot climates and high CO2 in the past, we have so far been unable to identify any period in Earth's history when CO2 levels rose as rapidly as today."

The good news, he says, is that experiments in Australia and round the world have shown it is possible to curb overfishing, runoff and pollution, to limit their local impact on corals. "Our latest studies have shown corals have a great capacity to bounce back if you take these pressures off them – and this means we still have a window of opportunity to act.

"But we need to act immediately."

Prof. Pandolfi says the action required is threefold – (i) aggressively reduce CO2 emissions (ii) reduce overfishing, pollution and coral habitat destruction and (iii) implement sound management to improve overall reef health.

On Thursday, July 12, Prof Pandolfi will present his team's latest research to the International Coral Reef Symposium. This work aims to disentangle the impact of local effects (like runoff and rainfall) from global effects (like warming and ocean acidification) on the coral's ability to calcify (or grow) by studying rates of calcification in the columnar coral Goniopora over the past 1000 years.

"We've observed widely different effects in some corals – for example when calcification of Porites corals declined by 14 per cent on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, it increased by 24 per cent on Western Australian reefs. This has got to be down to local effects, as both corals are experiencing some of the same global impacts."

Managing corals so they thrive, as in the case of WA, may hold the secret of saving the world's coral reefs in a time that might otherwise bring near-extinction.

Professor Pandolfi will be available to media at a press conference today at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia, at 9.30 AM AEST, along with other leading researchers to comment on the impact of climate change and other stressors on the world's reefs.

Contact: John Pandolfi
j.pandolfi@uq.edu.au
61-400-982-301
ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies

SF State researcher releases first results from nationwide bee count

Great Bee Count will be held on August 11 this year

A San Francisco State University biologist has released the initial results of her nationwide citizen science project to count bee populations and has found low numbers of bees in urban areas across America, adding weight to the theory that habitat loss is one of the primary reasons for sharp declines in the population of bees and other important pollinators.

Now the researcher plans to add to her data -- which is now the largest single body of information on bee activity in North America -- by further comparing how bee populations are faring in different types of habitats. On August 11 this year, SF State Biologist Gretchen LeBuhn and her team of researchers are urging people across the country to count bees in their yard and neighborhood gardens as part of a "Great Bee Count."

LeBuhn launched the campaign, called The Great Sunflower Project, in 2008 to answer important questions about the decline of pollinators and the ecosystems that rely upon them. She enlisted the help of nearly 100,000 volunteers to count bees they found in their garden or yard annually. Volunteers simply count the number of bees they see on a sunflower or other plant during two 15 minute observations per month, then report the data on LeBuhn's website.

Analyzing observations from 12,000 gardens, LeBuhn has found that urban areas have much fewer visits from bees than other habitats. Volunteers in urban gardens reported finding an average of 23.3 bees per hour, compared to 30.4 per hour in rural areas and 31.6 in forests and wildlands. Volunteers in desert areas reported an average of 31.9 bees per hour.

This year, LeBuhn has put out a renewed call for data from areas known for their healthy bee populations in order to determine the "tipping point" at which urban features can fragment bee habitats enough to cause population decline.

"We're really interested in doing deeper comparisons of rural and urban and suburban areas, and what that means for pollinators," she said.

She also plans to look closely at desert areas, which have higher bee diversity than wooded areas. "We know that desert systems are centers of species diversity for bees," she said.

The results mapped over the U.S. show that the average number of bee sightings can range from zero to more than 30 bees per hour, depending in part on how large the overall garden is. In general, the largest gardens have the most bee visits -- between 30 and 40 per hour on average. But even smaller gardens are visited by an average of 25 bees, and patio pots get an average of 13 bee sightings per hour.

Using data from these areas, LeBuhn plans to look deeper into habitat fragmentation, a phenomenon that occurs when in areas where bees' habitats are disrupted by buildings, highways or other urban features. In these areas, bees often cannot find the resources they need to survive or are limited in their mobility.

But healthy bee populations are thriving in some urban community gardens, which saw an average of 41.9 bees per hour. LeBuhn believes community gardens will provide key information on habitat fragmentation, and has a graduate student who plans to look at this trend in-depth for San Francisco community gardens.

"We were surprised that community gardens had such high visitation rates," LeBuhn said, "but that's good news because they're important sources of food production, and we want to make sure they're getting enough pollinators."

This year, LeBuhn hopes to gather more data with the help of "Garden Leaders" -- individuals who act as the liaison for groups of volunteers in different areas. The Garden Leaders will distribute seeds to participants and should make data-gathering more efficient.

While participants can make their observations and send in data any time, Aug. 11 has been named the day of the "The Great Bee Count," in which participants all over the country will observe on the same day. Volunteers can view the interactive map showing data from the previous four years of the project and zoom in to see what is happening in their neighborhood or find areas where more data is needed.

"The results map that's now on the website is pretty powerful," LeBuhn said. "For those who already participate, this can help them look at the area around them and see if there's anyone else they can encourage to join."

To join The Great Sunflower Project, visit its website. SF State is the only master's-level public university serving the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin. The University enrolls nearly 30,000 students each year and graduates about 8,000 annually. With nationally acclaimed programs in a range of fields -- from creative writing, cinema and biology to history, broadcast and electronic communication arts, theatre arts and ethnic studies -- the University's more than 212,000 graduates have contributed to the economic, cultural and civic fabric of San Francisco and beyond.

Contact: Philip Riley
hiriley@sfsu.edu
415-405-3803
San Francisco State University

UC Santa Barbara researchers play key role in UN Environmental Assessment

		Two children walk along a dirt road on the agricultural frontier in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. Credit: David López-Carr

Despite the ever-louder drumbeat for sustainability and global efforts to advance environmental initiatives, Earth remains on a collision course with "unprecedented levels of damage and degradation." That's according to a new United Nations (U.N.) assessment that includes UC Santa Barbara researchers among its authors.

The U.N. Environment Programme released its fifth Global Environmental Outlook report –– commonly known as GEO-5 –– in June, on the eve of the recent Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil. Produced over three years, in collaboration with some 600 experts worldwide, the document details global progress, or lack thereof, on a host of internationally agreed-upon goals to protect the planet and reverse a longstanding pattern of production and consumption of natural resources.

"If you look at these issues over several years, it can be overwhelming and discouraging," said David López-Carr, professor of geography at UCSB, director of the Human-Environment Dynamics (HED) lab, and a lead author on two of the report's 17 chapters. "But learning takes time, and patience truly is a virtue. Many of the debates we have now are over things we weren't even talking about 40 years ago. So we do see areas of progress."

		This shows the UN Environmental Programme’s core set of environmental indicators. Credit: UN Environmental Programme

With Kostas Goulias, a UCSB geography professor and transportation expert, and Matthew Gluschankoff, an undergraduate who works in the HED lab, López-Carr helped write the opening substantive chapter to the GEO-5, "Drivers," about what causes environmental change. Population and consumption are deemed the primary drivers. High population growth in remote rural areas such as sub-Saharan Africa –– and the impact that such demographic transition is likely to have on human well-being and environmental integrity –– remains an especially "under-recognized" issue, according to López-Carr.

"These areas are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they have a direct dependence on the environment for subsistence and livelihoods in a way that we do not," he said. "When breakdowns in commodity pathways change for us, they are very quickly replaced by another. But breakdowns in subsistence pathways are less resilient to shocks to the system. They are much more local, and people are surviving on local resources through dint of their own labor. When a breakdown happens to them they have to deal with it immediately, in their environment, without the benefit of the global system that we have."

Former UCSB visiting scholar Narcisa Pricope, an assistant geography professor at Southern Oregon University, leant her expertise in the emerging concern over drylands to the chapter "Land," alongside López-Carr, who focused on population, agricultural and forest transitions, and policy implications. Among other insights, they reveal that competing demands for fuel, food, feed, fiber, and raw materials are intensifying pressures on land –– and that globalization and urbanization are further aggravating those demands.

"My overall sense is that things will get worse for land before they get better," said López-Carr. "I would be delightfully but significantly surprised if, in 10 years, we had more forest conservation, reversed soil decline, and enhanced farmland sustainability."

As much about finding solutions as it is about exposing problems, the GEO-5 also offers big-picture policy suggestions and identifies small changes with the potential for big impact –– from supporting universal primary education and health care, and improving governance and capacity building, to reducing consumption of red meat. López-Carr describes the latter recommendation as "a win-win for human health and the environment."

About the role of UCSB academics in the report, López-Carr added: "There is a lot of incentive, particularly in the UC, to publish, publish, publish in academic journals and get grants. We do that, at the highest level, yet we also use that knowledge and research for policy mechanisms like this that are of global importance, for which we are not paid by the university, or by anyone. I'm really proud of the contributions coming out of UCSB, and this geography department."

Contact: Shelly Leachman
shelly.leachman@ia.ucsb.edu
805-893-8726
University of California - Santa Barbara

NOAA’s global coral bleaching prediction and monitoring get major upgrades

First four-month forecast issued; no bleaching seen in Northern Hemisphere through October.

Healthy coral reefs contain thousands of fish and invertebrate species found nowhere else on Earth. They provide millions of dollars to local economies through tourism and fishing. Many scientists believe that drugs to treat cancer, arthritis, and other diseases may be found by examining the unique species that live only in and around reef systems. Credit: NOAA

NOAA announced today a major advance in the ability to predict mass coral bleaching – providing the probability of bleaching up to four months into the future – with a newly developed global seasonal outlook system.

Using the new seasonal ecological forecast system, unveiled at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch does not anticipate any large scale coral bleaching events in the Northern Hemisphere through October 2012.

“This advance in bleaching warning systems represents another milestone in our efforts to save the world’s critically important reef systems,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, in the symposium’s keynote address. “The state of reefs today should raise concerns for everyone. Reef ecosystems are globally important, and healthy reefs are the life-line for local communities. Their continued existence is a moral imperative for the global community.

“NOAA is firmly committed to bring new scientific efforts to change the current trajectory of loss of reefs and the services they provide,” she added.

Every week, the new system uses 28 runs of NOAA’s latest climate model to warn coral reef managers, scientists, stakeholders, and the public of large-scale bleaching events. It builds upon the first global seasonal bleaching outlook system, released by NOAA in 2008.

The new system uses sea surface temperature forecasts from NOAA’s operational climate forecast system, the same system used for predicting El Niño and seasonal temperature and precipitation forecasts. Coral bleaching occurs when stress, usually high temperature, causes corals to expel their symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) and, if prolonged or particularly severe, may result in coral death.

NOAA has also significantly advanced near-real time satellite monitoring of the high ocean temperatures that can cause coral bleaching. A new generation version of NOAA’s product suite now provides daily 5-km satellite monitoring of coral bleaching thermal stress for reefs around the world. This represents 100 times finer resolution, more frequent observations, and more data than the current twice-weekly 50-km global satellite coral bleaching monitoring.

The new products use a blend of data from NOAA and international partner environmental satellites that orbit the globe with data from geostationary weather satellites, providing 10 to 50 times more observations each day than the old products. NOAA has been providing the current coral bleaching products to U.S. and international coral reef communities since 1997. These products have been very successful in detecting the thermal stress typically associated with mass coral bleaching.

During most mass bleachings, high ocean temperatures usually occur over a broad area that includes both coral reefs and adjacent open ocean waters. Since coastal water temperatures over reefs often are higher than those in other areas, NOAA’s old products often underestimated the thermal stress associated with a bleaching event or missed small-scale features found right over reefs. The new 5-km products should correct for this.

“Advances in coral reef management practices have driven the need for higher resolution monitoring and enhanced prediction of coral bleaching,” said C. Mark Eakin, Ph.D., coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program. “Higher resolution products, which is the improvement to Coral Reef Watch products most requested by scientists and resource managers, allow us to more accurately predict mass coral bleaching events, as well as more accurately account for episodes of minor or no coral bleaching.”

Healthy coral reefs support commercial and subsistence fisheries as well as jobs and businesses through tourism and recreation. Local economies also receive billions of dollars from visitors to reefs through diving tours, recreational fishing trips, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses based near reef ecosystems.

NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch partnered with the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction to develop the next-generation global seasonal bleaching outlook. Research and development of the high-resolution, 5-km coral bleaching thermal stress monitoring products has been a partnership between Coral Reef Watch, NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research, NASA, the University of South Florida, the United Nations Environmental Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science. Both new products were supported by funding from the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program and are now available on the Coral Reef Watch website.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources.

Copper making salmon prone to predators

Findings have implications for brake pads, copper mines

		WSU researcher Jenifer McIntyre has found that minute amounts of copper from brake linings and mining operations can affect salmon to where they are easily eaten by predators. Washington State University photo

Minute amounts of copper from brake linings and mining operations can affect salmon to where they are easily eaten by predators, says a Washington State University researcher. Jenifer McIntyre found the metal affects salmon's sense of smell so much that they won't detect a compound that ordinarily alerts them to be still and wary.

"A copper-exposed fish is not getting the information it needs to make good decisions," says McIntyre, a postdoctoral research associate in WSU's Puyallup Research and Extension Center. Her research, conducted for a University of Washington doctorate with colleagues at UW and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, appears in the latest issue of the journal Ecological Applications.

Earlier research showed that copper impacts a salmon's sense of smell. Other research showed that when a salmon's sense of smell is affected, its behavior changes.

McIntyre put the two together, exposing juvenile coho salmon to varying amounts of copper and placing them in tanks with cutthroat trout, a common predator. The results were striking.

Salmon are attuned to smell a substance called Schreckstoff. German for "scary stuff," it is released when a fish is physically damaged, alerting nearby fish to the predator's presence.

In her experiments, conducted in a four-foot-diameter tank, fish that weren't exposed to copper would freeze in the presence of Schreckstoff, making it harder for motion-sensitive predators to detect them. On average, half a minute would go by before they were attacked.

But salmon in water with just five parts of copper per billion failed to detect the Schreckstoff and kept swimming. They were attacked in about five seconds.

"It's very simply and obviously because predators can see them more easily," says McIntyre. "They're not in lockdown mode."

The unwary exposed fish were also more likely to be killed in the attack, being captured 30 percent of the time on the first strike. Unexposed fish managed to escape the first strike nearly nine times out of ten, most likely because they were already wary and poised to take evasive action.

McIntyre also noticed that the behavior of predators was the same whether or not they had been exposed to copper.

Copper finds its way into streams and marine waters from a variety of sources, including motor vehicle brake linings, pesticides, building materials and protective boat coatings. Actual amounts will vary from undetectable in rural or forested areas to elevated in urban areas, especially when runoff from a storm washes roads of accumulated brake dust and other contaminants.

With testimony from McIntyre's NOAA colleagues and others, the Washington State legislature in 2010 started phasing out copper brake pads and linings over the next 15 to 20 years. According to the state Department of Ecology, brake pads are the source of up to half the copper in the state's urban waterways.

McIntyre used concentrations of between 5 and 20 parts per billion but has sampled highway runoff with 60 times as much copper. Copper's effect is mediated by organic matter, which can make the metal unavailable to living things.

"My scenarios are potentially more like a hard-rock copper mining situation than storm water runoff, which typically carries dissolved organic matter along with the copper and other contaminants," McIntyre says.

Alaska's proposed Pebble Mine, for example, would produce tens of billions of pounds of copper near Bristol Bay, the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

Contact: Jenifer McIntyre
jen.mcintyre@wsu.edu
206-369-1832
Washington State University

Taking a bird's eye view could cut wildlife collisions with aircraft

Using lights to make aircraft more visible to birds could help reduce the risk of bird strikes, new research by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found. The study, which examined how Canada geese responded to different radio-controlled model aircraft, is the first of its kind and is published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.

Aircraft collisions with wildlife – primarily birds – is a serious and growing threat to civil and military aviation, as well as an expensive one: bird strikes cost civil aviation alone more than $1.2 billion a year world-wide.

Although almost all efforts to prevent bird strikes focus on the airport environment, the fate of US Airways flight 1549 – which was forced to make a dramatic landing in the Hudson River in New York in 2009 after several Canada geese were sucked into its engines – shows that effectively reducing bird strikes requires developing strategies that work far beyond the airport perimeter.

Now, a team of researchers from the USDA, Indiana State University and Purdue University, is taking a bird's eye view of the problem. According to Dr Bradley Blackwell of the USDA's National Wildlife Research Center: "Birds see so much differently than humans do, so we cannot translate our own perceptual understanding to the problem of birds avoiding aircraft."

Using knowledge about birds' visual systems, the team tested the response of Canada geese to three radio-controlled aircraft: the first with lights off, the second with lights on, and the third painted to resemble a bird of prey.

They found geese respond more quickly to the threat of an approaching model aircraft when its lights were on, making it more visible to the birds.

The study also found that the geese were just as cautious of the standard radio-controlled aircraft as the predator model, an important finding. According to Dr Blackwell: "Because Canada geese will respond to aircraft approach as a potential threat, the theory behind how animals respond to predators is very applicable to understanding the response to aircraft approach, and we can enhance this response via lighting."

The research – the first to combine visual sensory ecology with anti-predator behaviour – could set the aviation industry on the right track to developing lighting systems that will reduce the rate of bird strikes.

Next, the team hopes to expand their understanding of the visual ecology of other bird species commonly struck by aircraft, so they can design aircraft lighting that will be seen by a range of species. "This is only the first step. As well as lighting, we also want to understand how to manipulate aircraft paint schemes so that birds find them easier to detect. It's exciting work," he says.

Reference: Bradley F Blackwell et al (2012). 'Exploiting avian vision with aircraft lighting to reduce bird strikes', doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02165.x, is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology on Tuesday 10 July 2012.

Contact: Becky Allen
beckyallen@ntlworld.com
44-794-980-4317
Wiley

 

Scientists join forces in call for action to save coral reefs

Like their warrior ancestors, leaders of many Pacific Island nations have been making efforts to safeguard their countries, this time by sounding an alarm as the impact of climate change becomes more apparent. Today their efforts received a big boost with the release of a Scientific Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs that is supported by over 2,400 scientists, showing the threats that reef corals are under across the globe and calling for governments worldwide to take steps to protect valuable coral reef ecosystems. The statement was drafted by a group of eminent scientists under the auspices of the Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) at Stanford University in California and was released at the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia.

"Rising sea levels, more intense storms, changes in ocean chemistry due to air and water pollution - all these stress coral reefs," observed Steve Palumbi, an expert on corals with the Center for Ocean Solutions and the chief organizer in developing the consensus statement. "At least 25 percent of the world's coral reefs have been degraded. Because of the global origin of climate change, the only way to tackle this is through a worldwide effort."

Pacific island nations have a special relationship with coral reefs. Long a part of their culture and heritage, today many islanders derive their livelihoods from tourism and fishing that are dependent on healthy reefs. Pacific island leaders will again take their case for a concerted effort to help coral reefs to world bodies including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Pacific Islands Forum where they hope the support of scientific experts representing diverse interests will galvanize action by governments and the islands' development partners.

"We want leaders of Pacific island nations to know that the scientific community has their backs and is ready and available to support them in their calls for action, based on scientific evidence," pointed out Meg Caldwell, executive director of COS. "Members of our working group have agreed to be on call, to show up at conferences and to be available to write materials to share locally, regionally and globally."

"This is an extraordinary example of science working in close collaboration with policy makers to better the human condition and the environment," stated Larry Crowder, science director at COS. "As a scientist, it's exciting to apply the best available science to urge and shape a better policy course."

The Climate Change and Corals working group was the brainchild of a discussion between COS management and the founder of the Okeanos Foundation, Dieter Paulmann, which has supported the COS working group.

The threat of climate change to Pacific island nations has been periodically spotlighted by world bodies, including the 2000 UN Ministerial Conference on Environment and Development in Asia and Pacific which issued this statement: "The Pacific islands view climate change as a major disaster and have openly and continuously criticized the industrial nations for failure to take definitive steps towards abating pollution of the global atmosphere. There are three distinct impacts from this pollution; global warming, sea level rise and climate change. In fact, despite continuing improvement in measurements and predictive computer programmes, nobody knows exactly what the outcome of atmospheric pollution will be, but if the current range of peculiar weather and catastrophic deaths of a wide range of important ecosystems are any indication, the small islands of the world have good cause to be worried."

In another move to build momentum behind the issue, last month Pacific island leaders met at their annual Association of Pacific Island Legislatures assembly in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands. There Meg Caldwell and working group member, Robert Richmond, Professor of Conservation Biology, University of Hawaii, explained the implications of the Scientific Climate Change and Coral Consensus Statement and urged island leaders to utilize the scientists from the COS working group to help them build and support their cases for action on climate change in discussions with world bodies and for actions locally toward coral reef resilience in the face of climate change. At the conclusion of the APIL meeting, the delegates adopted a resolution strongly supporting local, regional and international action. Their resolution joins a March 2012 companion resolution from their executive branch counterparts from the Micronesia Chief Executives' Summit.

By the end of this century, the best available science predicts that sea levels may rise by as much as 1.7 meters while ocean chemistry and temperatures could change enough to kill many of the coral reefs that support thriving Pacific ecosystems critical to people's jobs and habitat. Pacific warriors have a long history of defending their islands. The world may be at the edge of another pivotal period in history where the well being of nations hangs on actions to safeguard the planet's environment.

The Center for Ocean Solutions is a collaboration among Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Hopkins Marine Station, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Across these institutions, COS draws from about 80 scholars, researchers and educators who work on coastal and ocean ecosystems in the natural, physical and social sciences. COS also works with experienced conservation practitioners and policy experts. Located at Stanford and in Monterey, California, COS is uniquely positioned to leverage expertise and develop practical solutions to the most urgent and important ocean conservation problems.

Contact: Karen Marvin
kmarvin@stanford.edu
650-492-1763
Stanford University

 

UNC research: Corals on ocean-side of reef are most susceptible to recent warming

UNC marine scientist Karl Castillo uses a pneumatic drill to take a core sample from a massive starlet coral (Siderastrea siderea) on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef off the coast of Belize in the western Caribbean. Credit: Justin Ries, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Marine scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have linked the decline in growth of Caribbean forereef corals — due to recent warming — to long-term trends in seawater temperature experienced by these corals located on the ocean-side of the reef. The research was conducted on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System in southern Belize.

The results were revealed online in the July 8 issue of Nature Climate Change, a journal that publishes research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications for the economy, policy and the world at large.

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System is the second largest reef ecosystem in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, stretching along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. In February 2009, UNC researchers Karl Castillo and Justin Ries used a large pneumatic drill to extract 13 core samples from massive starlet corals on the reef and measured the thickness of their annual growth bands in order to estimate trends in their growth rates over the last 100 years. They found a decline in skeletal growth in corals closest to the open ocean, while growth in corals from the other two reef zones — the nearshore (located closest to the shore) and the backreef (located directly behind the reef crest) — remained relatively unchanged.

Castillo, a postdoctoral researcher in the marine sciences department in the College of Arts and Sciences who is a native of Belize, said they surmised that this decline in skeletal growth in the forereef zone was due to a recent rise in seawater temperature, but they wanted to test their hypothesis in this latest study.

They gathered sea surface temperatures for the study site from 1982 to 2008 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's (NOAA) high-resolution seawater temperature database, which were derived from satellite measurements. They compared that dataset with seawater temperatures extracted from temperature loggers Castillo had installed at the study site in 2002.

 

Historically, corals in the area closest to the open ocean have seen cooler and more stable seawater temperatures, while those located closest to the shore and behind the reef crest have experienced warmer and more variable seawater temperatures.

Since 1982, the average summer sea surface temperature has been increasing in all three reef zones. Castillo said they found that with an increase in sea surface temperatures, skeletal growth declined over the 1982-2008 interval in the zone closest to the open ocean, while coral growth rates remained relatively stable over that same period in the other two reef zones.

"It looks like forereef corals are the first of this species to be affected on this reef system, suggesting that they may be most vulnerable to recent and future global warming," Castillo said. "However, because backreef and nearshore coral colonies have historically been exposed to warmer and more variable seawater temperatures, they seem to be less affected."

The findings of this new research study offer insights into how corals are likely to respond to future warming. They also highlight the importance of understanding cross-reef differences in the corals' tolerance for rising sea temperatures in an era of rapid global climate change. By identifying which corals are most vulnerable to warming, this work may help coral reef managers triage the reef ecosystem that they are trying to protect, the scientists said.

The researchers, accompanied by graduate and undergraduate students, headed back to Belize this summer to collect additional coral core samples that span the entire reef system, a length of approximately 200 miles, Ries said. Their previous study covered less than one-fifth of that region.

Ries is assistant professor of marine sciences. The other study authors are Jack Weiss, an adjunct assistant professor in the curriculum for the environment and ecology, and Fernando P. Lima, from the University of South Carolina. The research was supported by the Carolina Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity, Seeding Postdoctoral Innovators in Research and Education (SPIRE), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Contact: Kim Spurr
spurrk@email.unc.edu
919-962-4093
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of Miami-led study finds winds played important role in keeping oil away from S. Florida.

New NSF funded study shows how currents and winds shaped where hydrocarbons from Deepwater Horizon went

		In a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, a team from the University of Miami, Colorado School of Mines and Naval Research Laboratory used numerical simulations to explain the crucial role of the wind-induced surface drift on the fate of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This drift was found to have a strong influence on the displacement of oil, accounting for the influence of winds on the top surface of ocean waters through the generation of waves and additional circulation. These particular wind effects are generally not represented in ocean circulation models and were missing from real time ocean circulation predictions during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This figure shows a comparison between the satellite-observed (left) and the modeled (right) oil slick extent on June 7, 2010. Credit: NASA-MODIS (Left)/ Univ. of South Florida (right)

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in spring 2010 is the largest oil spill in the history of the United States, with more than 200 million gallons of crude oil released at about 1,500 m. depth off the Mississippi Delta in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the accident, the proximity of the intense Loop Current, flowing from the Yucatan Channel to the Florida Straits, raised major concerns that the oil at the surface of the ocean would be headed toward the South Florida and East Atlantic coastal areas. However, the dominant transport of oil and oil products was toward the Northern Gulf coastline, and no oil was observed to reach the Atlantic Ocean.

In a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, University of Miami (UM) scientists Matthieu Le Hénaff, Villy Kourafalou, Claire Paris, Judith Helgers, and Ashwanth Srinivasan, in collaboration with Zachary Aman from the Colorado School of Mines, and Patrick Hogan from the Naval Research Laboratory, use numerical simulations performed at the High Performance Computing core of UM's Center for Computational Science (CCS) to explain an important aspect of the observed oil transport.

The group has demonstrated the crucial role of the wind-induced surface drift on the fate of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This drift was found to have a strong influence on the displacement of oil, accounting for the influence of winds on the top surface of ocean waters through the generation of waves and additional circulation. These particular wind effects are generally not represented in ocean circulation models and were missing from real time ocean circulation predictions during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Incorporating this wind effect to the ocean currents, the UM scientists performed a novel 3D modeling study of the oil's spread from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico to the ocean's surface, which allowed a realistic representation of the evolution of the 2010 oil spill. The oil spill simulations were verified through observational composites from UM's Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing (CSTARS) and from Roffer's Ocean Fishing Forecasting System, and benefited from regional circulation models that assimilate real ocean data; no change in the oil spill extent took place to match observations. Results from this study showed that the model simulation including the wind-induced drift led to substantially improved results over an identical simulation that excluded wind drift effects.

"It is striking to notice how a large part of the surface oil erroneously made it to the Atlantic coast of Florida in the simulations that ignored the wind-induced drift. The simulation taking the drift into account correctly calculated the final destination of the oil along the Northern Gulf coastline, in remarkable agreement with observations," says Le Hénaff, a research scientist at the UM Rosenstiel School, who is also affiliated with NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS). "The dominant northward winds during spring and summer of 2010 led the surface oil to be pushed onto the Northern Gulf shelf areas and toward the coasts, away from the interior of the Gulf and the Loop Current southward transport. This effect, together with the evolution of the Loop Current, was crucial in maintaining the oil from the Deepwater Horizon rig within the Gulf of Mexico and away from the South Florida coral reefs and beaches."

This study was made possible by NSF-RAPID 1048697 award to C. Paris. The contribution of Villy Kourafalou was made possible in part by a grant from BP/The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.

The CCS has emerged as a leader in providing a robust cyber infrastructure designed to address major computational challenges, and is now recognized among the State's top academic centers, and is gaining national prominence for its work. The Center supports diverse and often interdisciplinary projects, and offers extraordinary intellectual, hardware, and software resources to its partners. Its high performance computer core supports work a variety of fields such as genomics, computational biology, marine ecosystems modeling, climate and meteorology, computational fluid dynamics and social systems informatics. 

The University of Miami's mission is to educate and nurture students, to create knowledge, and to provide service to our community and beyond. Committed to excellence and proud of the diversity of our University family, we strive to develop future leaders of our nation and the world. Founded in the 1940's, the Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science has grown into one of the world's premier marine and atmospheric research institutions. Offering dynamic interdisciplinary academics, the Rosenstiel School is dedicated to helping communities to better understand the planet, participating in the establishment of environmental policies, and aiding in the improvement of society and quality of life. 

Contact: Barbra Gonzalez
barbgo@rsmas.miami.edu
305-421-4704
University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science