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- Title
Wave exposure and temperature drive coral community structure at regional scale in the Cuban archipelago.
- Authors
Caballero-Aragón, Hansel; Armenteros, Maickel; Perera-Valderrama, Susana; Martell-Dubois, Raúl; Rey-Villiers, Néstor; Rosique-de la Cruz, Laura; Cerdeira-Estrada, Sergio
- Abstract
Abiotic factors and human impact have a considerable influence on reef corals driving their dynamics and distribution. Most studies on coral reefs address only biological variables that cannot alone explain the predominant stressors and processes. For this work, we studied 46 shallow reefs and 48 deep reefs between 2010 and 2013 in the Cuban archipelago. Our aim was to understand how three coral community response variables (living coral cover, coral relative dominance, and habitat rugosity) were related to seven potential abiotic predictor variables (wave exposure, sea surface temperature, degree heating week, chlorophyll-a concentration, particulate organic carbon, photosynthetically available radiation, and the diffuse attenuation coefficient), measured from remote sensing from 2002 to 2013. A human impact index (Gravity) was also included as potential predictor. We applied a routine analysis based on linear distances to analyze the relationship between coral and abiotic variables/human impact index. The abiotic variables showed large spatial variability, explaining between 27 and 55% of the spatial variability in coral community structure supporting their strong predictive power. Wave exposure influenced all the coral metrics resulting in higher coral cover and rugosity in the less exposed sites. Average temperature had a positive effect on coral cover and rugosity, suggesting that warmer temperature promotes the coral calcification rates. Thermal anomalies and photosynthetically available radiation had a less important but negative effects. The human impact index indicated that reef sites close to Havana were subjected to highest impact. Acute stressors and stochastic events (e.g., diseases outbreak) have likely overshadowed the effect of other abiotic variables. Our study concludes that wave exposure and temperature were the main abiotic drivers of coral community structure in Cuba archipelago and likely in other reefs from the Caribbean Sea.
- Subjects
CUBA; HAVANA (Cuba); CORALS; CORAL communities; CORAL reefs &; islands; ARCHIPELAGOES; OCEAN temperature; INDEPENDENT variables; COLLOIDAL carbon
- Publication
Coral Reefs, 2023, Vol 42, Issue 1, p43
- ISSN
0722-4028
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s00338-022-02308-w