ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Biodiversity of coral reef cryptobiota shuffles but does not decline under the combined stressors of ocean warming and acidification.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Hidden impacts of ocean warming and acidification on biological responses of marine animals revealed through meta-analysis.Nature communications · 2024Pooled it
- Spatial Complexity and Rare-Taxon Turnover Structures Benthic Coral Reef eDNA Communities.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Article
- Cryptic marine gastropods in Hawai'i exhibit variable response to multidecadal in situ environmental changes.PloS one · 2026Article
- The Distribution, Diversity, and Indicator Species of Coral Communities Under the Influence of Environmental Changes in the Subtropical Peninsula of Southern China.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- High abundances of crustose coralline algae inside cryptic coral habitats linked to coral reef functioning.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- A control theory framework and in situ experimental platform for informing restoration of coral reefs.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Review
- Some coral reef communities may degrade and change but persist.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Experimental coral reef communities transform yet persist under mitigated future ocean warming and acidification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Widespread scope for coral adaptation under combined ocean warming and acidification.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Emigration patterns of motile cryptofauna and their implications for trophic functioning in coral reefs.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Long-term coral microbial community acclimatization is associated with coral survival in a changing climate.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Ocean acidification drives global reshuffling of ecological communities.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Functional and phylogenetic responses of motile cryptofauna to habitat degradation.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Inter-annual variability patterns of reef cryptobiota in the central Red Sea across a shelf gradient.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Ecological succession of the sponge cryptofauna in Hawaiian reefs add new insights to detritus production by pioneering species.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Are experiment sample sizes adequate to detect biologically important interactions between multiple stressors?Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ocean-warming and acidification are predicted to reduce coral reef biodiversity, but the combined effects of these stressors on overall biodiversity are largely unmeasured. Here, we examined the individual and combined effects of elevated temperature (+2 °C) and reduced pH (-0.2 units) on the biodiversity of coral reef communities that developed on standardized sampling units over a 2-y mesocosm experiment. Biodiversity and species composition were measured using amplicon sequencing libraries targeting the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) barcoding gene. Ocean-warming significantly increased species richness relative to present-day control conditions, whereas acidification significantly reduced richness. Contrary to expectations, species richness in the combined future ocean treatment with both warming and acidification was not significantly different from the present-day control treatment. Rather than the predicted collapse of biodiversity under the dual stressors, we find significant changes in the relative abundance but not in the occurrence of species, resulting in a shuffling of coral reef community structure among the highly species-rich cryptobenthic community. The ultimate outcome of altered community structure for coral reef ecosystems will depend on species-specific ecological functions and community interactions. Given that most species on coral reefs are members of the understudied cryptobenthos, holistic research on reef communities is needed to accurately predict diversity-function relationships and ecosystem responses to future climate conditions.
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