The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Long-Term Region-Wide Declines in Caribbean Corals
Abstract
We report a massive region-wide decline of corals across the entire Caribbean basin, with the average hard coral cover on reefs being reduced by 80%, from about 50% to 10% cover, in three decades. Our meta-analysis shows that patterns of change in coral cover are variable across time periods but largely consistent across subregions, suggesting that local causes have operated with some degree of synchrony on a region-wide scale. Although the rate of coral loss has slowed in the past decade compared to the 1980s, significant declines are persisting. The ability of Caribbean coral reefs to cope with future local and global environmental change may be irretrievably compromised.
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Cited by
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Climate change impacts on marine ecosystems
Doney, S. C., Ruckelshaus, M., Emmett Duffy, J., Barry, J. P., Chan, F., English, C. A., Galindo, H. M., Grebmeier, J. M., Hollowed, A. B., Knowlton, N., et al. (2012) · Annual Review of Marine Science · doi:10.1146/annurev-marine-041911-111611 · Cited by 3,014
Phase Shifts, Herbivory, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs to Climate Change
Hughes, T. P., Rodrigues, M. J., Bellwood, D. R., Ceccarelli, D., Hoegh-Guldberg, O., McCook, L., Moltschaniwskyj, N., Pratchett, M. S., Steneck, R. S., & Willis, B. (2007) · Current Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.12.049 · Cited by 1,635
New paradigms for supporting the resilience of marine ecosystems
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Metadata
- Authors
- Gardner, T. A., Côté, I. M., Gill, J. A., Grant, A., & Watkinson, A. R.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2003-08-15
- Volume
- 301
- Issue
- 5635
- Pages
- 958-960
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2024763652
- Cited by
- 2,222
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 47.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Long-Term Region-Wide Declines in Caribbean Corals. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1086050
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- Gardner, T. A., Côté, I. M., Gill, J. A., Grant, A., & Watkinson, A. R. (2003). Long-Term Region-Wide Declines in Caribbean Corals. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1086050
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
