Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-7-2020

Publication Title

Frontiers in Marine Science

Keywords

Florida reef tract, Coral connectivity, Biophysical modeling, PageRank, Community detection, Reef management

ISSN

2296-7745

Volume

7

Issue/No.

312

First Page

1

Last Page

16

Abstract

Connectivity between coral reefs is critical to ensure their resilience and persistence against disturbances. It is driven by ocean currents, which often have very complex patterns within reef systems. Only biophysical models that simulate both the fine-scale details of ocean currents and the life-history traits of larvae transported by these currents can help to estimate connectivity in large reef systems. Here we use the unstructured-mesh coastal ocean model SLIM that locally achieves a spatial resolution of ~100 m, 10 times finer than existing models, over the entire Florida Reef Tract (FRT). It allows us to simulate larval dispersal between the ~1,000 reefs composing the FRT. By using different connectivity measures and clustering methods, we have identified two major connectivity pathways, one originating on the westernmost end of the outer shelf and the other originating on the inner shelf, North of the Lower Keys. We introduce new connectivity indicators, based on the PageRank algorithm, to show that protection efforts should be focused on the most upstream reefs of each pathway, while reefs best suited for restoration are more evenly spread between the Lower and Upper Keys. We identify one particular reef, North of Vaca Key, that is a major stepping stone in the connectivity network. Our results are the first reef-scale connectivity estimates for the entire FRT. Such fine-scale information can provide knowledge-based decision support to allocate conservation and restoration resources optimally.

Comments

©2020 Frys, Saint-Amand, Le Hénaff, Figueiredo, Kuba, Walker, Lambrechts, Vallaeys, Vincent and Hanert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Additional Comments

NOAA program #s: NA15NOS4510226, NA10OAR4320143; FRS-FNRS grant #: 2.5020.11

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ORCID ID

0000-0001-6597-0268, 0000-0001-8385-7066

DOI

10.3389/fmars.2020.00312

Peer Reviewed

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