MCR LTER 3Yr Report 2007 V
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This document is a contribution of the Moorea Coral Reef LTER (OCE 04-17412) June 8, 2007 Schedule for MCR LTER Site Visit Sunday, July 8 Check into Sheraton Moorea Lagoon & Spa Afternoon Optional Moorea Terrestrial Tour 4:30-5:00 Gump Station Tour/Orientation 5:00-5:30 Snorkel Gear Setup for Site Team/Observers – Gump Dock 5:30-6:30 Welcome Cocktail – Gump House 6:30-7:30 Dinner – Gump Station 7:30-9:30 NSF Site Team Meeting – Gump Director’s Office 9:30 Return to Sheraton Monday, July 9 6:45 Pickup at Sheraton 7:00-7:45 Breakfast – Gump Station 7:45-11:45 Field Trip (Departing Gump Station; Review Team Dropped at Sheraton) 12:15 Pickup at Sheraton 12:30-1:30 Lunch – Gump Station 1:30-4:30 Research Talks – Library • MCR Programmatic Research Overview (Russ Schmitt) o Time Series Program (Andy Brooks) o Bio-Physical Coupling (Bob Carpenter) o Population & Community Dynamics (Sally Holbrook) o Coral Functional Biology (Pete Edmunds & Roger Nisbet) • Concluding Remarks (Russ Schmitt) 4:00-5:00 Grad Student/Post Doc Demonstrations – MCR Lab & Gump Wet Lab 5:00-6:30 Grad Student/Post Doc Hosted Poster Session/Cocktails – Library 6:30-7:30 Dinner – Gump Station 7:30 Return to Sheraton Tuesday, July 10 7:15 Pickup at Sheraton 7:30-8:30 Breakfast – Gump Station 8:30-12:00 Site Talks - Library • IM (Sabine Grabner) • Site Management & Institutional Relations (Russ Schmitt) • Education & Outreach (Michele Kissinger) • Network, Cross Site & International Activities (Sally Holbrook) 12:00-1:00 Lunch – Gump Station 1:00-5:30 Executive Session – Gump Director’s Office 5:30-6:45 Exit Interview - Library 6:45-9:30 Tahitian Feast & Dance Performance – Gump Station 9:30 Return to Sheraton Wednesday, July 11 7:00-8:00 Breakfast – Gump Station 8:00-12:00 Optional Field Trips 12:00-1:00 Lunch – Gump Station i ii Volume I. Program Overview Table of Contents Schedule for MCR LTER Site Visit…………………………………………………………….. i Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Physical Setting and Major Environmental Drivers………………………..………………. 3 Programmatic Area Research Summaries……………………………………………………… 7 Spatially Explicit Time Series Program……………………………………………………. 7 Bio-Physical Interactions and Coupling…………………………………………………… 21 Population and Community Dynamics…………………………………………………….. 29 Coral Functional Biology……………………………………….………………………..... 41 Information Management……………………………………………………………………… 51 Objective…………………………………………………………………………………… 51 Data Acquisition and Processing…………………………………………………………... 51 Approach…………………………………………………………………………………... 52 System Architecture……………………………………………………………………….. 52 Database Interfaces………………………………………………………………………… 53 Future Directions…………………………………………………………………………… 54 Site Management and Institutional Relations…………………………………………………. 57 Site Management…………………………………………………………………………... 57 Institutional Relations……………….…………………………………………………….. 58 Education and Outreach………………………………………………………………………. 61 Education………………………………………………………………………………….. 61 Outreach…………………………………………………………………………………… 64 Network, Cross-Site and Collaborative Activities……………………………………………. 67 LTER Network Activities………………………………………………………………… 67 LTER Cross-Site Interactions…………………………………………………………….. 67 Other National and International Collaborations…………………………………………. 69 List and Brief Description of Collaborators and Organizational Partners……………….. 71 References…………………………………………………………………………………….. 77 iii iv Introduction The Moorea Coral Reef (MCR) LTER site was established in 2004 as an interdisciplinary, landscape-scale program to provide better understanding of the processes that modulate ecosystem function and structure of coral reefs, one of the most diverse and productive of all ecosystems (Muscatine and Porter 1977, Hatcher 1990). Coral reefs increasingly are being affected by perturbations that range from short term, relatively localized disturbances (where return to the original state is possible) to more chronic, widespread influences of shifts in climate that may fundamentally alter the ecosystem (Connell 1997, Knowlton 2001, Gardner et al. 2003, Lesser 2007). Indeed, coral reefs are thought to be especially sensitive to changes in environmental drivers associated with climate, leading to concern that climate forcing may cause sweeping, worldwide changes in this ecosystem in the coming decades (Knowlton 2001, Lesser 2007). Hence, a fundamental goal of the MCR LTER is to elucidate the mechanistic basis of change in coral reef ecosystems by (i) identifying major controls over reef dynamics and (ii) determining how they are influenced jointly by disturbance and climate. Such mechanistic understanding should allow more accurate forecasts of how coral reef ecosystems will respond to perturbations that operate across different spatial and temporal scales, which in turn can inform policy makers and resource managers. The conceptual framework for the initial 6 years of the MCR science program is shown in Fig. 1; the components and initial research questions of our science program are described more fully in the next section, and a brief summary of our activities to ‘operationalize’ the framework is given in Box 1 below. While research by MCR investigators addresses each of the five core LTER focal areas1 (which will facilitate cross-site comparisons), we self-organized three broad but interrelated thematic areas that are internally integrated and informed by our time series program (Fig. 1). Briefly, the three areas that we are exploring are: (a) the interactions and coupling between physics and biology; (b) population and community dynamics; and (c) the functional biology of stony corals, the foundational group of the ecosystem. There are, of course, critically important linkages among these three thematic areas. Integration of our research program is further enhanced by a modeling and synthesis component intended to refine forecasts of long term change, to yield major conceptual advances, and to inform existing and produce new theory. Findings from our modeling and synthesis, process-oriented and time series activities will feed back to each other (e.g., long term projections become hypotheses) to make linkages among our science components both tight and dynamic. General issues of scale and scale dependency connect much of our science program. Disentangling cause and effect relationships and forecasting responses of coral reef ecosystems require that we understand several types of scaling issues. For a start, most reef organisms have a bipartite life cycle and hence have demographically open local subpopulations that are connected to others via dispersal of early developmental stages. Many critical biological processes on the reef are influenced, for example, by the flow of fluid, and relevant hydrodynamic and oceanographic processes operate at spatial scales that range from the sub- millimeter to thousands of kilometers and temporal scales that range from milliseconds to 1 (i) Dynamics and control of primary production; (ii) population dynamics of key groups; (iii) pattern and control of organic recycling; (iv) pattern of inorganic input and nutrient dynamics; (v) consequences of disturbance. 1 decades. Further, it is imperative to know how results found at one space or time frame can (or cannot) be extrapolated to others. For instance, field experiments that explore such important regulatory processes as density dependence almost inevitably must be conducted at relatively small spatial (~ m2) and brief temporal (~ days to months) scales; furthermore, space almost invariably is substituted for time in such explorations of regulatory processes with the assumption that the underlying mechanisms operate similarly in both domains (Schmitt and Holbrook 2007). These illustrate the general problem in ecology of predicting, in this case, large-scale dynamics from small-scale processes (Chesson 1998). Often local scale interactions do not provide insight into regional scale processes, which has led to recent developments in scale transition theory (Melbourne and Chesson 2006). Contemporary studies on coral reefs have underscored the wide array of spatial and temporal scales necessary to attain ecologically relevant understanding of coral community dynamics (Edmunds and Bruno 1996, Sebens et al. 1997, 1998, Murdock and Aronson 1999, Bellwood and Hughes 2001). They also have revealed the need to understand the functional linkages across levels of biological organization - from molecules to the ecosystem - as well as the nature of feedbacks across multiple ecological scales (Agrawal et al. 2007). An elegant example of this is provided by coral bleaching episodes, which can be evaluated best through studies operating at landscape scales (sensu Mittelbach et al. 2001) and spanning years to decades. Studies of the mechanistic basis of bleaching have revealed profound connectivity among the molecular and bio-physical aspects of photochemistry (Warner et al. 1999, Jones et al. 2000), the molecular genetics of the algal symbionts (LaJeunesse et al. 2003), the interactive effects of light and temperature (Hoegh-Guldberg 1999), and the bleaching pattern within and among colonies (Rowan et al. 1997). Thus, our LTER Figure 1. The conceptual research program is designed to explore to the extent possible framework for the MCR LTER relevant functional, spatial and temporal scales. Achieving our science goals also requires a sufficient understanding of important nonlinearities in ecological responses of coral reef ecosystems, and this broad theme is threaded through our science program. Understanding