Andrew H. Baird

TL;DR: International integration of management strategies that support reef resilience need to be vigorously implemented, and complemented by strong policy decisions to reduce the rate of global warming.

TL;DR: The distinctive geographic footprints of recurrent bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002 and 2016 were determined by the spatial pattern of sea temperatures in each year, suggesting that local protection of reefs affords little or no resistance to extreme heat.

TL;DR: Coral reefs in the present day have less time than in earlier periods to recover from bleaching events, and Tropical reef systems are transitioning to a new era in which the interval between recurrent bouts of coral bleaching is too short for a full recovery of mature assemblages.

TL;DR: This study bridges the gap between the theory and practice of assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, under the emerging framework for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems, by rigorously defining both the initial and collapsed states, identifying the major driver of change, and establishing quantitative collapse thresholds.

TL;DR: A detailed analysis of the bleaching response of 4160 coral colonies, representing 45 genera and 15 families, from two depths at four sites on reefs fringing inshore islands on the Great Barrier Reef suggests that much of the spatial variation inBleaching response was due to assemblage composition and thermal acclimation.