-: Good evening, everyone.
We're pleased to have you join us
for our annual Seaside Chat Speaker Series
about ocean topics associated with Flower Garden Banks
National Marine Sanctuary, and the Gulf of Mexico.
We're also part of the National Marine Sanctuaries
webinar series and the NOAA Science Seminar Series.
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all attendees will be in listen-only mode.
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and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites.
We will notify registered participants via email
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Hello again, my name is Kelly Drinnen,
and I'm the Acting Education Coordinator
for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
I'll be facilitating today's webinar
from Dickinson, Texas.
And also with me today is Taylor Galaviz,
our Constituent Engagement Specialist,
who will be helping me with the back-end administration
of this webinar.
In 1972, the United States ushered in a new era
of ocean conservation
by creating the National Marine Sanctuary System.
Since then, we've grown into a nationwide network
of 15 National Marine Sanctuaries,
two Marine National Monuments,
and at this point, six sites awaiting designation.
In all, the areas already designated
concern more than 620,000 square miles
of spectacular ocean and Great Lakes waters,
and that's an area nearly the size of Alaska.
These marine protected areas
are kind of like national parks,
but they're all underwater.
The National Marine Sanctuaries Act
gives NOAA the authority to designate
special areas of the marine environment
as National Marine Sanctuaries.
It also mandates that the Office
of National Marine Sanctuaries conduct research,
monitoring, resource protection, education, outreach,
and management of America's underwater treasures
to preserve them for future generations.
And in addition to being places for recreation and research,
National Marine Sanctuaries are also living classrooms,
places where people can see, touch, and learn
about the nation's Great Lakes and ocean treasures.
This webinar series is just one part
of that national education and outreach effort.
The Seaside Chats series specifically
is hosted by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary,
the only National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
This sanctuary consists of 17 banks
or small underwater mountains
that are home to some of the healthiest
coral reefs in the world,
amazing algae and sponge communities,
and deep reef habitats that feature
an abundance of black corals and gorgonians.
We invite you to learn about us
by visiting the sanctuary website
at flowergarden.noaa.gov.
Today's presentation focuses on climate monitoring
in both Flower Garden Banks
and Florida Keys national marine sanctuaries.
In 2023, record high ocean temperatures
led to a significant amount of coral bleaching
in both of these sanctuaries.
But what does this mean for the future of our coral reefs?
Today, we'll learn from Nicole Besemer
how the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program
tracks reef health and monitors specifically for changes
brought on by climate change.
Nicole Besemer is a marine biologist
whose work focuses primarily on South Florida
and Caribbean ecosystem management and conservation.
She serves as the Coral Program Lab Manager
and National Coral Reef Monitoring Program,
or NCRMP, Caribbean Climate Operations Coordinator
with NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic
and Meteorological Laboratory Coral Program.
Lots of acronyms there.
Nicole's current work focuses on the implementation
of the climate monitoring component of NCRMP,
including the planning and operation
of associated field work and research trips,
as well as data analysis related to how ocean acidification
and global warming are affecting coral reef communities
in the Atlantic and the Caribbean.
Nicole holds a Master of Professional Science
in Tropical Marine Ecosystem Management
from the University of Miami Rosensteil School of Marine
and Atmospheric Science,
and a Bachelor of Science in Marine Science and Biology
from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania.
Welcome, Nicole.
Nicole: Thank you so much for having me.
-: And I've just handed over screen control for you.
Nicole: All right.
I accept it.
-: And feel free to turn on your camera as well.
Oh, there you are.
-: There you are.
-: All good?
Can we see me?
-: Yes, I can.
And we can hear you just fine.
Take it away.
-: Perfect.
Thank you so much, Kelly, for that introduction.
As Kelly just said, my name is Nicole Besemer.
I'm an oceanographer for AOML's Coral Program.
And just to add to what Kelly said a little bit about me,
I found my love for the ocean as a little kid
going fishing with my dad
off the coast of New York and New Jersey.
It was these experiences growing up
that led me to just,
I really needed a career in studying the ocean
and doing something I was super happy and passionate about
and could give back to.
So I got my undergraduate degree
at a small little Pennsylvania State School
at East Stroudsburg University.
It was then I decided that if I wanted to study the ocean,
I should probably be near one.
So I moved to Miami and I got my master's degree
in Tropical Marine Ecosystem Management
from the University of Miami.
These degrees opened the doors for amazing opportunities.
I held multiple technician positions
for the NOAA Fisheries studying near shore habitats.
I was able to work for the National Park Service
studying sea turtles.
And what I found is I really missed
was just bringing that diving component
and being in the water back into my life.
And so I was very fortunate to be able to get a position
as an oceanographer
with NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic
Meteorological Laboratory.
And so that is why today I am talking to you
about climate monitoring and Flower Garden Banks
and the Florida Keys.
And so I wanted to quickly start off
with just a little bit of background
of actually what is a coral?
And most people think that they are just rocks
or plants on the bottom of the ocean,
but they are actually animals and they move and they feed
and they reproduce just like others do.
And so when you kind of zoom in on a coral
like that picture on the left,
you can see the individual polyps
and this cartoon on the right is actually showing
sort of how their body structure works.
They are closest related to jellyfish,
which is why they look very similar with those tentacles.
And the cool thing about corals
is that they actually have a photosynthetic algae
that lives within their tissues.
So it gives them their color
and provides energy for the coral just like plants.
And so why do we care about corals?
Well, they are a biodiversity hotspot.
They provide coastal protection from hurricanes and storms
for our infrastructure on coastlines.
They also contribute billions of dollars to the US economy.
So these are really, really important ecosystems
that contribute more than I think most people realize.
It's also well known that they are in extreme decline.
So one of the aspects that we use
to monitor climate change is temperature.
As temperature is rising in our atmosphere,
so is the temperature in our oceans.
And this is what causes coral bleaching.
And I'll get into this a little bit more later,
but coral bleaching is when it is too warm
for this coral to survive
and it actually loses that relationship
with the symbiotic algae.
And that's where it's leave that white exposed skeleton.
And now some corals can return from this,
but it is also one of the leading drivers
of mass mortality in coral reef ecosystems.
Another important aspect of climate impacts
is ocean acidification.
And so CO2 in our atmosphere is on the rise
and it is also on the rise in the ocean.
And when CO2 rises, a metric called pH
or the acidity of the ocean is where it starts to decline.
And this is where the concept
and the term ocean acidification comes into play.
And so when the pH of the seawater declines,
this is what makes it really hard
for calcifiers in our ocean, such as coral,
crabs, lobsters, shellfish,
and especially coral to exist and persevere.
And so when they are growing,
the pH can reduce their shell
and break down the existing skeleton.
And when this happens
and we combine the ocean acidification
and the temperature impacts,
this leads to sort of a way
that it is affecting the ecological impacts of the reef.
And so these reefs contribute so much to us
and when they are suffering and declining,
it has a huge impact on the species that live there
and need them to live.
And so one of the ways we really see how reefs are growing
and persisting and healthy is if they're growing
or if they are eroding and breaking down.
And so it's these sort of important three indicators
that NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program
wanted to create a program to look at coral reef health
in this robust picture
that takes in all the components of a coral reef
and is able to make it comparable across jurisdictions
and be able to assess how our U.S. coral reefs are doing.
And so they established
this integrated and focused monitoring plan
called the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program or NCRMP
because the government loves their acronyms.
And it was established in 2013
with four previously independent monitoring programs,
benthic, fish, climate monitoring and socioeconomic.
And this is how we are now assessing
the health and status of our coral reefs.
Our group specifically is in charge of climate monitoring
in the Caribbean and Atlantic.
So we get to travel to all of these amazing locations
on this map, Florida Keys, the U.S. Virgin Islands,
Puerto Rico, Dry Tortugas.
Within Florida, we go down through the Florida Keys
and up through Broward County.
I'm very fortunate to be able to get to travel
to all of these places.
When we set up this monitoring program,
we took these three indicators that I mentioned before,
thermal stress, ocean acidification and ecological impacts,
and we wanted to create a sort of spatio-temporal way
to look at these.
So we have some of our methods
that sort of look at a wider scale, broader scale,
and then kind of dial in on some areas
to try to get more information there
and to use more instruments and surveys
to be able to have just really a widespread concept
of how these reefs are doing.
And all of this information is then sort of taken back
and put into these status reports
and able to give sort of an assessment
of how these reefs are doing.
And so one of the ways to kind of get
into these monitoring methods is looking
at our ocean acidification and carbonate chemistry.
And so in the carbonate chemistry system,
there are five parameters that we look to measure.
And so we can kind of get these information
from water samples that are collected by hand
at the surface or by divers at the bottom.
We also have buoys that can collect these samples
and monitor these OA parameters for us.
And we take them back to the lab and analyze them
and we're able to get these five parameters.
And this is what gives us sort of the whole picture
of how the water chemistry and ocean chemistry is doing.
And so some of the work that we have been able to do
with this data is we have a long-term monitoring project
that has been going on since 2011.
We have these permanent sites in the Florida Keys
where water samples are collected every two months.
And we were able to take this and create one
of the largest synthesis of carbonate chemistry
in the Florida Keys.
And so what we found is that our actually offshore reefs
are more susceptible to ocean acidification conditions.
And areas in near shore reefs or smaller patch reefs
closer to land actually have temporary refuge
from ocean acidification due to the primary production
of the local areas.
To kind of dig into our temperature measurement,
we use an instrument on the right here
called a subsurface temperature recorder or an STR.
These instruments are really high precision
for climate quality work.
And they're also able to be deployed
on the seafloor for three years.
So this little graphic kind of shows our site
at the Flower Garden Banks.
We set it up on a depth transect.
So the top of the reef within the Flower Gardens
is at 20 meters, all the way down to 35 meters.
And so while most sea surface temperature data
is actually satellite data
that we can collect from the surface,
these instruments allow us to actually see
what the reef is experiencing in real time.
We recently went, our latest trip to the Flower Garden Banks
National Marine Sanctuary was back in 2022.
And we were able to collect our latest round
of temperature recorders.
And so this is kind of a little example
of the data that we get to see.
You can see really strong seasonal trends
between summer and winter.
And it's also really interesting to see
sort of the anomalies of storms
that happened during the summer
and how that really changes
and drives temperatures in this area.
Next one, we're kind of starting to look
into our reef growth and reef erosion metrics.
We use two instruments called
a calcification accretion unit,
which is those two PVC plates you kind of see there.
And then a bioerosion monitoring unit or a BMU,
which is that little white piece of coral block.
And so these are installed on the reef
and they're actually deployed
and left there for three years.
And so after three years, they are able to be collected
and we can actually look inside of them
to see how they're changing.
And so they represent a little piece of the actual reef
and you can see what's grown on them, what's eroded them.
So we take these samples back
and we actually have a CT scanner
just like you would find in a hospital.
And we're able to scan these instruments
and quantify erosion rates and accretion rates
for these local reefs.
Another way that we are able to kind of assess reef health
is actually through carbonate budget surveys.
And so this survey is a type of census based survey
and it determines the abundance
of important organisms to reef building.
So this is reef building, reef eroding.
And to kind of dig into that a little bit,
our reef calcifiers are going to be coral on the left here
and our CCA or crustose coralline algae.
These are the organisms that are actually growing the reef.
And then we have bioeroders.
So this is going to be parrotfish, bioeroding sponges.
This is actually an endolithic algae
that lives below the skeleton of the coral and urchins.
And so we can take all the counts of these creatures
on a reef at a certain time.
And we fit those to their known rates
of either growth or erosion.
And what we get is actually a quantification
of whether these reefs are actually growing
or if they are essentially eroding away
and sort of disappearing before our eyes.
And so this is a study that we did a few years ago.
And if you kind of look to notice here
is we were able to take all of our sites
that all of our NCRMP teams work on.
So collect fish data, collect coral and benthic data.
And we were able to fit this carbonate budget model
throughout the Florida Keys.
And what we found is that actually all those red dots
are reefs that are in net loss.
So they are losing their reef structure.
And we found that 70% of our reefs in Florida
are actually in a net erosional state.
So this was very alarming for us.
And a really important metric to know
and to be able to disseminate that information to managers.
Lastly, to kind of collect sort of a more holistic picture
of how reefs are looking,
we collect landscape photo mosaics.
And so this is our principal investigator of our lab,
Dr. Ian Enochs, shortly after the first signs
of this coral bleaching event happened.
And so we take this,
you'll kind of see this little coral rig that he,
or the camera rig, excuse me, that he's holding here.
We swim over a 10 by 10 meter plot,
and we're actually able to take those pictures
and build a 3D structure of the coral reef.
And this is actually an example from Flower Gardens.
And I think it's so beautiful.
It shows how many corals are actually there.
And so while this is in sort of its 2D format,
we can actually look at these corals in its 3D format
and be able to look through
and see how much structure there is.
And I mean, when you even take a little bit more
of a closer look, this is a much more zoomed in picture
of sort of what the reef looks like out at Flower Gardens.
This is out at East Flower Gardens Bank.
You can just see how many corals are there
in just a small little area.
Also down at Cheeca Rocks, we have a MAPCO2 buoy.
And so this stands for a Moored Autonomous PCO2 buoy.
And what this is, it was installed back in 2011.
And it has instruments that float below it
that actually monitor temperature, carbon dioxide, pH.
And it has a satellite where it can send that information
in almost real time.
So I can be able to go and access
and see what the ocean conditions were like
down at Cheeca Rocks yesterday.
And this became super important this past summer.
We started to get sort of an inkling
that it was going to be a warmer summer.
And this buoy we were able to use to really monitor
what these temperatures were experiencing.
And so you can kind of see in that sort of light blue line
is that most of the summer, specifically in July
and through August was spent above the bleaching threshold.
And so Cheeca Rocks is a really special reef.
It is sort of a very unique,
almost known to be climate resilient, reef.
It's only a mile and a half offshore
off the coast of Islamorada.
And it is home to so many beautiful fish
and mounding corals and soft corals.
And it's just really full of life.
And so this is sort of what it looked like
in the early in the summer.
We had some, once again, foresight
that there was going to be a hot summer.
And so while we normally only collect
some of this information once a year,
we decided to go in June and kind of get our before sample
to see what the reef looks like before that.
And so by the time that we were able to come back
on July 24th, this is what it looked like.
All of that symbiotic algae that I was explaining before
had been lost from the coral.
Almost every single coral was 100% bleached.
The sea fans were essentially like cooking and roasting.
There's obviously still a lot of fish,
but it was just so, so devastating
to see this reef in this state.
I have not been going there for as many years
as some of my other colleagues,
but I can confidently say that the people
that have for the last few bleaching events
have never seen Cheeca Rocks like this.
So just as a little reminder,
the reason that we see that white starkness
is actually because that is the skeleton.
The healthy algae has left the coral skeleton,
the polyp of the sort of living tissue of that coral.
It is now left with the skeleton.
And so corals can come back from this.
It does not mean it is an instant death sentence.
It all kind of depends how much time they spend
at that coral bleaching threshold.
And so there have been many more of these events before
so that we know that we can,
that corals can survive and they can persevere.
But this is the worst that anyone has seen
an experience like this, this reef in a very long time.
And so we used our mosaic methods to really track this.
And so, as I mentioned, we went June 30th,
that's where you can see on the left,
there's still a lot of color, a lot of health to the reef.
And by July 24th,
almost every single coral was completely bleached.
And so this technology gives us a really great way
to just kind of see a zoomed in picture
of what's happening here.
And it's just, it was so awful to see
how many hard coral species that were like bleached or pale
and the soft coral species that had died.
And so it was really important for us
to sort of monitor this.
And so we made it a mission
that we were going to visit this reef every month
to try to track how this was progressing.
And so by the time September rolls around,
and it's a little hard to see maybe from with the comparison
but things were looking a little less white.
They're a little more pale
and there was actually some color coming back to it.
And this is really interesting
for the fact that most of August,
this reef was still experiencing temperatures
above the bleaching threshold,
but corals were actually surviving
and color was coming back to them.
So that was really unique
and really sort of uplifting for us to see that.
And they did not get away unscathed.
And so as you can see, this is a brain coral.
One of them is extremely healthy back in September.
And then we also have corals that were starting to die.
They had been at that temperature for too long
and they were not able to survive
and maintain their nutrients.
So this coral on the bottom,
it was starting to die
and lose its tissue and its coverage.
And so even follow that a little bit more,
we continued to go through October and December.
And by October, some of these corals were actually full
and had their dark, dark colors back looking really healthy.
But obviously some of these were still bleached.
And I think it's really interesting to see
kind of then once December came around
and things were really cooling down,
that some of these corals had survived completely,
but some were actually losing still a lot of their tissue
and hadn't come back.
And so we saw this pattern
where a lot of the tops of the corals
was sort of this direct sunlight
and then this direct impact hadn't survived.
And so we plan to keep monitoring.
Unfortunately, our weather has been
really rough down here recently.
We haven't been able to been back out since December 5th,
but we plan to continue to keep monitoring
and the progression and the death of these corals
and hopeful or more so recovery rather than death.
And to be able to really get a large picture
of how this bleaching events impacted this local coral reef.
And so one of the ways we kind of plan
to continue to do this
is we have our six long-term transects at Cheeca Rocks.
We're trying to visit these as often as monthly as possible
to continue this collection.
We're collaborating with the sanctuary
and we're increasing our climate monitoring
at the Mission: Iconic Reefs,
which are seven reefs in the Florida Keys
that the sanctuary has devoted a certain project
to really restoring these reefs
to get them hopefully back to what they used to be.
Our lab is also working with some partners
to look at bioerosion of sort of critical
reef building species and certain colonies.
And then we hope to take all of these mosaics
that we've collected
and do a large colony tracking analysis
similar to this paper on the right.
And so what we're able to do
is sort of track each of these individual colonies
over time, see how much tissue, see how much bleached,
see how much tissue came back,
see how much tissue was lost
and get a really good quantification of what these reefs,
how they survived, what we can learn from them,
which coral species and which coral genotypes
were more hardy and more resistant
to coral, to climate change and bleaching.
And so we take all this data and we collect a lot of it
and try to not get too deep in the science here,
but this work is so important,
but it doesn't actually matter unless it's known about
and the community understands
what these reefs are experiencing.
And so we're working very hard to create reports
available for stakeholders and managers
and the general public after each of our monitoring trips,
like here on the right.
And all of this data then is taken and compiled
from our climate data to the fish, the benthic
and the socioeconomic, our human perceptions.
And it's put into a report to kind of give
this overall picture and status report
of how these reefs are doing.
And so these are available for not only Flower Garden Banks
but they're also available in our other jurisdictions
that we visit.
The US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, throughout Florida.
And then there was a national coral reef report
that synthesized not only the Atlantic,
but all of this work is also done in the Pacific.
And so that report is available for the general public
and none of this would be able to be done
without my amazing team that is growing by the minute.
I think we've had three more people that have joined
since I even made this presentation,
but it is this amazing group of scientists
that make all of this possible.
And so with that, I just wanted to say thank you
and I will take any questions.
-: Thank you, Nicole. [cough]
I'm sorry, folks.
We are happy to take your questions
if you will enter them into the question box
there on your control panel.
If your control panel is hidden,
look for a little vertical bar
on the right-hand side of your screen.
There's a little orange arrow at the top.
Click on that arrow to reopen your control panel for you.
And you just look down for one of the gray bars
that says questions.
And then you can type in there
and we will start sharing these questions with Nicole.
So let me see what we've got
for an initial question for you here.
We had some that came in early on while you were talking.
All right, how much of the erosion
is attributed to coral mortality
due to water degradation in Florida reefs
prior to bleaching?
-: That is a good question.
I don't know if there is essentially a metric
to kind of quantify how much specifically is,
we look at the density of corals
and that can sort of give a picture,
but the thing is it's not really just one aspect
now at this point.
It's water quality, it's temperature,
it's the bioeroders.
And so we really try to use a very holistic
way of looking at this erosion.
And so while it's,
we use all these different metrics
to be able to put them together,
but I don't know if we can say at this point
exactly how much contribution to that
is specifically because of the water
versus just sort of the environment as a whole.
-: That makes sense.
All right, second question.
As ocean temperature increases,
it can't hold as much CO2.
Is that capable of remediating the acidification?
-: That is a good question.
And I will be honest that I am not an expert
in ocean chemistry.
So I don't feel specifically confident
in answering that question.
-: Okay, we will save that for later
and see if we can find a better answer for that.
Let's see.
How do you also incorporate coral disease into your models?
-: Yeah, that's a good question.
And so while disease is something
that is monitored,
it's become a metric when we take our,
when they do coral benthic studies
and different, sorry, excuse me, different surveys.
Disease is one of the things that is noted.
And so I think that when we say taking it into account,
we know when we're building the 3D models
and we're kind of comparing from one time point
to the next time point,
and we're also seeing these corals in real time.
So local experts are identifying whether,
okay, we see disease happening here.
For example, during the data from this paper
was a very specific disease outbreak.
And so while we can't attest that everything
with all of the loss of the coral
is specifically disease related,
this type of monitoring was specifically done
to track the disease progression.
And so there was more time points.
And so we're able to actually see
that that was specific loss to disease
and quantify it that way.
But in a larger scale, when we're going from year to year,
we're maybe not necessarily pinpointing that it was disease,
but in our case, because we're now looking at bleaching
for this past summer,
we've taken those very specific time points of bleaching.
There was actually, once a bleaching event happens,
there's not really as much active disease
that's taking over the coral.
This specifically with Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease,
they've actually found that rates of it decrease
as temperatures increase.
And so we hope that when we're looking
at this sort of bleaching study,
it'll be easier to kind of pinpoint
that things were specific to bleaching loss
rather than disease loss.
-: Okay, thank you.
How do you quantify damage to reefs
by tourists and researchers and surveyors and such?
-: Yeah, it's not as maybe straightforward
as it would seem.
We cannot necessarily tell if a coral
maybe got damaged and lost some of its polyps
from like a local person,
like a diver kicking it with their fin.
The one way that is probably the most obvious
is boat anchors.
And so most sanctuaries throughout the Florida Keys
and Flower Garden Banks,
I know as well set up mooring buoys.
And this is so important
because these are permanent mooring buoys.
They are connected to the bottom
and they allow a safe way for the public
to visit these sanctuaries
and not drop anchors on the bottom of the ocean
because that is often how they get caught
and pull up parts of the reef.
So that's the most obvious kind of way
that we can actually tell
that it was sort of a human visitation
versus something else.
But other than that, that's kind of the main way.
-: Thank you.
Now onto the Flower Garden Banks.
Can you elaborate a bit more
on the status of the Flower Garden Banks
in face of all the bleaching and so forth
that you've been studying?
-: Yeah, of course.
I can't say I'm the local Flower Garden Banks expert
more than the people that actually work for the sanctuary.
But I do know that the bleaching events
while it took place in 2023
kind of started a little bit later
from when Florida had experienced it.
And so while the bleaching happened,
it was close enough that it was getting into sort of fall
into cooler season
that the temperatures cooled down a lot quicker.
And so it's my understanding
from sort of collaborating with our partners
as I haven't been there from this past summer
is that the reefs of the Flower Garden Banks
still survived and perceived fairly well after this event.
But Kelly, please correct me if that is not the case.
-: That is the case.
We did start later than Florida,
but we started earlier than usual.
So normally our hottest months at the Flower Garden Banks
are August and September.
And so we start to see bleaching
in the September into October into November.
And this year, coral bleaching started like the end of July.
So it was a lot earlier than usual.
Temperatures increased a lot,
but we are deeper to start with
at about 60 feet at the shallowest point on our reefs.
And we are surrounded by deeper water,
which also helps to mitigate temperature some.
So it takes longer for our temperatures
to elevate to the same extent as those in the Keys.
And then a lot of the Keys reefs
are just a lot closer to the surface
and they get those temperature effects
a lot sooner than the deeper reefs.
So it was the shallower reefs in Florida,
if I'm not mistaken,
that bleached most severely and the earliest.
And then it took longer again,
even there to reach the deeper reefs.
-: Yep, that's correct.
Yeah, I might've forgot to mention that,
but all those pictures of that reef Cheeca Rocks
that I mentioned, it's only a mile and a half offshore
and that entire reef sits in 15 feet of water.
So you can kind of see everything from the surface,
generally just floating from the surface
if you're snorkeling.
And so it's really close and it's really exposed.
And so that's definitely one of the reason
that those shallower and more inshore reefs
suffered greatly than the offshore reefs.
-: Okay, next question.
You said the primary production
is helping mitigate some bleaching effects.
Are you seeing more protection in areas
that have high nutrient pollution?
-: Yeah, so I think the sort of primary producing areas
are actually helping in a couple of different ways.
The water systems with higher nutrients
tend to, in some cases, not be as clear.
So Cheeca Rocks, the water quality at certain times
is really awful.
I've been there where I can only see maybe like my hand away
and that's it.
And so we do think that some of that sort of water clarity
or lack of water clarity and shading
can really help in the bleaching.
But another way that the primary producers
in those inshore reefs really help is with CO2 uptake.
And so those seagrass beds,
they're actually altering the water chemistry
and that's what's making those areas
more hospitable for corals.
-: Thank you.
Can you elaborate why you said the deeper offshore reefs
were more susceptible to ocean acidification
than the patch reefs in the Keys?
Is it just because there are more coral cover
left on the patch reefs than on the fore reefs?
-: Yeah, so it's a little bit to build on
kind of what I just said.
We're actually seeing in some senses
higher coral cover at patch reefs versus offshore.
And so I wouldn't say that that's really a why,
but it's almost like how are the inshore reefs so persistent
whereas the offshore reefs,
we've lost so much coral cover.
And I think that's where when we really started
to look into the environmental parameters,
we're seeing this sort of ocean acidification refuge.
And so there's obviously a bunch of other
sort of environmental parameters that play into this,
but it's one sort of way that maybe these,
the water quality in this area is actually more
essentially allowed for corals to grow and persist.
So that's sort of one way that we've just kind of been able
to tease apart that water chemistry
and see that reduction in CO2 and reduction in pH
is actually helping those reefs persist more.
-: Sorry, my microphone.
What are the biggest priorities over the next few years
for this monitoring program?
-: That is a great question.
So the biggest priorities over the next few years
with this monitoring program
are to really kind of pull and develop the data
that we've been collecting.
A lot of climatological data
can't actually really draw trends and conclusions
until almost 10 to 15 years.
And so we are just now reaching that point
of the data that we have.
And so while we have so much that we can do
with the data that we've had,
we haven't really been able to pull these status
and trends from the data.
And so there's going to be a big push for analysis
of this upcoming data, or excuse me,
a big push for analysis with the data that we have.
So this will be in the form
of likely scientific publications,
but also technical reports
and really be able to get this information
back to the local managers and stakeholders
to be able to use that for better management purposes.
-: Thank you.
Here's a really good question.
I'm a diver, how do we help?
-: That is a great question.
So I think one of the best ways to help as a diver
is truthfully just to learn and experience the ocean.
The more that you can kind of learn and not only learn,
but then help teach and explain
sort of some of these conditions that is happening
and what's the reefs are experiencing
and the state of these reefs
to be able to make people more aware of what's happening.
It's so important that we sort of like drive this attention
and get the attention about the sort of the state
of our reefs.
So I think that's one of the best ways.
And of course, in other ways, it's do safe diving practices,
practice proper buoyancy.
If you see trash, collect trash.
Those are some of the best ways to be able to give back.
-: I think that's a great answer.
Are there areas where coral reefs are growing
rather than eroding?
-: Yeah, absolutely.
And so while that sort of image I showed before,
we can go back to, let's see, there we are.
So I would also like to say like very specifically,
Flower Garden Banks is very much growing.
Out of all of our carbon and budget surveys
that we have completed there,
all of the reefs that all of our sites
that we have studied are still very much net growing
or net erosional.
And so while in the Florida Keys,
it's a little bit of a different story.
We see a lot of red on here, but we do see green.
And that's where we actually found,
there is still some reefs that are growing
and we call this metric net carbonate production.
So that is the carbonate that's growing
and the carbonate that is being eroded away
and that's how much is left.
And so all of these green sites
that we're seeing on this map are reefs that are growing.
And so it is much less than the ones that are eroding,
but that's where we sort of noticed
that we were able to see that these sort of,
if you look at the really, really inshore reefs,
we see a lot of red here, red and orange.
But if you actually look at the mid-channel reefs,
oops, hold on.
If you actually look at the mid-channel reefs,
this is where a lot of that green kind of comes into play.
And that's sort of that, those sort of shallower,
this is where Cheeca Rocks falls into that category.
And so there are still quite a bit of reefs
in the Keys that are growing.
So that's why we're trying to learn the most
from these reefs and why they're doing so well.
-: Okay, so I'm scrolling through my,
there's a long list of questions here.
Trying to find a specific one.
Okay, do coral predators like parrotfish
become more aggressive during and after bleaching
when the corals are weakened?
-: Great question.
I do know that, I don't know if specifically to bleaching,
but one observation that we have seen
is that when a coral is sick or diseased,
is that those sort of open lesions
do actually attract parrotfish.
So I don't know if aggressive is the more appropriate word,
but I do think that there has been
some at least anecdotal observations
of when corals are at least like more exposed or more open,
they can definitely feed more.
That being said, I think part of what,
the corals actually lack less nutrition
for them when they are bleached.
And so while there was not,
we did not see any like sort of loss of fish life
while the corals are bleached.
I don't know if we can necessarily say
that we saw more or less parrotfish feeding.
-: Thank you.
What lessons have you all learned
from the extremes of this past year
in terms of building climate resilience?
-: That's a great question.
I think one thing that we've realized
is that we can put in so much effort,
but we need to start making
a lot of our impacts larger scale.
And so part of that Mission: Iconic Reefs project
that I mentioned before, so much work and so much effort
that all of these different partners
and local entities, whether it's the sanctuary,
whether it's universities,
researchers are putting so much effort into restoration.
But if all of those corals that are being grown
and output, can die almost in one summer,
we need to be doing things on a larger scale.
And so there's a lot of work that we really need
to essentially like build up our restoration ability,
build up our way to be able to build corals
and sort of look at them holistically.
And so I think we've just realized
that this problem is here and it's now,
and it's not something in the future.
And we need to start making sort of strategic ideas
of how we can study and help to diminish
from this getting worse.
-: Thank you.
Are you seeing any adaptation or evolution
by the coral to the higher temperatures and water quality?
-: Yeah, so one of the projects
that is not in my specialty,
but something that our lab studies
is actually called urban corals.
And so our lab is located right off the coast of Miami.
And so if you have never been into Miami,
it's a very populated city.
The majority of the population lives right on the coastline.
And so what's really interesting
is that in these sort of intertidal areas
within the inshore,
sort of where all these houses are built on islands
and the bay and the ports and all of these cruise ships,
corals are actually living and they're not just living,
they are thriving and surviving.
So the, excuse me,
a PI in our lab, Dr. Michael Stadovan
has sort of been really taking a look
at all of these urban corals.
And he uses omics method.
So he looks at their genotype and their transcriptomics
and sort of how their genes are expressing
to be able to see what's different about these corals
and how they're actually adapted to live so well
in these areas where temperatures
get beyond anything normal that a coral would experience.
And they experience extreme exchanges.
So the salinity changes at a drop of a hat,
the temperature changes at a drop of a hat,
yet they're still able to survive.
So this is sort of an example and an adaptation
of these sort of extreme environment events
where corals are still able to persist.
-: Interesting.
I didn't realize that.
Are any of the surviving corals
from this year's bleaching event
being sampled for fragmentation,
like with Mission: Iconic Reefs
or at the Flower Garden Banks?
Or are we mostly using captive breeding at this point
to deal with the restoration issues?
-: Yeah, it's a little bit of both.
So with one of our upcoming projects
where we're sort of looking
at all of these different stressors,
so we're looking at nutrient loading,
we're looking at ocean acidification and temperature,
we're using a combination.
So some of these are just sort of
some of these corals are going to be grown
at a nursery setting,
but some of them are also going to be collected.
It is definitely, we don't have an exact plan for it yet,
but we would love to sample these corals at Cheeca Rocks
and be able to see sort of how their genes have changed
or what they looked like to begin with
to be able to survive this bleaching event.
So yeah, it's a little bit of a combination of both
and definitely plans to try to sort of really dig into that
and see how these corals are doing so well.
-: Great.
I'll also add that at the Flower Garden Banks,
when the bleaching hit
and we could see which corals didn't bleach,
we had already started collecting corals
to bank at Moody Gardens in Galveston,
this kind of repository,
the same way Florida Keys started doing it
when Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease took off.
We had a disease scare about a year and a half ago.
We thought it's time for us to start banking corals too.
So we've already started that.
But then when the bleaching came this year,
we also kept an eye out
for which corals were handling that the best.
And we brought some of those corals
into this collection
so that we can be doing studies ourselves
to understand a little bit more
about which corals have that higher heat tolerance
and so forth,
whether it's the corals themselves or the symbiotic algae,
whatever research might find for us,
we're hoping will give us some answers
as to how to proceed
in case we ever have to do coral restoration
at the Flower Garden Banks.
Let's see, next one.
As ocean temperature increases,
nope, we already did that one, sorry.
Still had it marked 'cause I wanna come back to that one.
What was your first experience
in marine related field work?
Was there a particular experience
that led you to marine biology?
-: Yeah, my first experience
with actual marine related field work
was I took an internship as soon as I moved to Miami,
actually working in billfish conservation.
And so it's nothing that I do now,
but I got a really important taste
of essentially conservation impacts
and connecting with the greater public
and just sort of how much of a difference
this can make for the ocean.
I think that I've been able to do
a lot of really fortunate jobs along the way.
My master's degree internship
was at Biscayne National Park.
And then I was able to take a job down in St. Croix
at Buck Island Reef National Monument,
where we did sea turtle monitoring and coral surveys
and lionfish control.
And just to be able to sort of get that really hands-on
immersed experience in the ocean,
I think is something so special and so unique.
And it's really led me to where I am today.
-: Fantastic.
All right, here's one from an informal educator.
What would you consider to be the main points
that I should attempt to get my audience to understand?
-: I think the main points is really
that our environment is becoming unsuitable
for certain corals.
And so these are due to essentially anthropogenic aspects.
And so it's just really important that we are aware
that we are losing these resources.
And if something, and how important they are to us.
-: And along those same lines,
is there a role that coastal communities
or scientists in other disciplines can play
in managing, monitoring and or conserving coral reefs?
-: Yeah, I think a lot of local programs,
I know there's quite a few throughout the Florida Keys
and in Miami, but citizen science is so important.
And it's a way for the general public
to really be able to contribute and help.
And so one of the really important things
that we were advertising this summer
is a program called Coral Bleach Watch.
And so this is a program that sort of predicts
and assesses coral bleaching throughout the globe.
And so they were asking for participants
to essentially report bleaching ID.
So if you are out on the water and you see coral bleaching,
there's a way to report it.
And this sort of helps scientists be able to understand
how a bleaching pattern is tracking.
There's also a lot of citizen science restoration programs.
In Miami, there's a project called Rescue Reef.
And this is where just normal people
that are open water scuba certified
can go out with scientists
and actually be able to help sort of implement
and participate in coral restoration and outplant corals
and put those back on the reef.
So I think there's a lot of ways for local residents
to get sort of engaged in their local science and research.
-: Thank you.
Another thing, as an educator myself,
another thing I would add to that conversation
is that what we're seeing with the Flower Garden Banks
is because they are so healthy to start with,
that they aren't as affected by overfishing,
by runoff from land, from all these other things
that really affect those coral reefs close to land
and close to access,
that they are proving more resilient
to a lot of other things.
And so when we're dealing with our coral reefs,
it's really important that people understand
it's the layers of problems
that are leading to the biggest problem
of the coral reefs not thriving anymore.
And so keeping all those threats down,
keeping as many down as possible
gives our reefs a better chance
of coping with climate change,
which is probably this big overarching threat.
And so things like runoff are a lot easier
for us to address immediately in our own households.
Things like marine debris,
those kinds of things that we can manage individually
and make a difference as classrooms,
as community groups and so forth
are really important to making our reefs better capable
of dealing with other threats and other challenges.
All right.
-: Well said.
-: How does bleaching affect other creatures of the reef,
like numbers of particular fish,
microinvertebrates, et cetera?
-: Yeah, oddly enough,
in the actual bleaching event,
I wouldn't say there is a direct impact to,
or at least an observable direct impact
to some of these creatures.
But I think the largest impact
is when bleaching essentially occurs for too long
and the coral dies and we lose these habitats
because then all that microfauna can't survive.
There isn't coral for parrotfish to feed on.
We're actually losing those environments
and we're losing that habitat
for these creatures to live on.
So while it's maybe not necessarily that exact,
like in the moment that we're losing fish
or we're losing this,
but over time, if corals continues to bleach
and be able to not survive,
we're losing habitat for these creatures.
And so that's where the biggest sort of like loss
and impact happens.
-: There are a couple of questions in the pile here
related to depth and bleaching.
What's the maximum depth we see coral bleaching
and does it seem to be different at different depths?
-: Yeah, I think that sort of, as
we kind of touched on before,
the shallower reefs are definitely much more affected
than the deeper reefs.
I don't know if I can say an exact depth
that the deepest bleaching was observed.
I don't know if Flower Garden Banks has that,
as you guys just sort of study your sort of reefs more,
but (coughs) excuse me.
But yeah, the water temperature becomes much more
sort of affected essentially by the atmosphere,
the shallower you get.
So it's going to be cooler and more stable
the deeper you go.
-: Thank you.
All right, let's see.
We have time for probably one more question.
Wow, we've managed to hit most of the
really high priority ones.
This one's specific to the Flower Garden Banks.
How does urbanization affect the Flower Gardens
and bleaching of the coral reefs?
And I think we kind of have answered that
in that because we're so far offshore,
we are not as affected.
It's not that we're not affected,
but it takes a lot more for that influence
to get that far offshore.
-: Yeah, that's not sort of a isolated pattern.
Globally, reefs that are more remote
or more separate from sort of human impact
are surviving very well.
So there is sort of that correlation
of sort of the human impact
and like I said, a closeness to it
and sort of how that sort of layered impacts
really plays into coral reef health.
-: And I think we've got room for one more.
Can either you or I comment on high temperature effects
and climate monitoring at the newly added banks
to Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary?
-: Yeah, I have not been there.
So I don't know, Kelly, if you have any input.
-: Are there plans for NCRMP to be involved
in the newer reef areas?
Do you know?
-: That's my question.
I don't know at this point in time
if there is an effort for climate to be expanding there.
I think it will depend on sort of depth
and accessibility to those reefs.
-: Okay.
Well, what I can say is that we
plan to expand our monitoring
to all the reefs within the sanctuary.
It's just gonna take time.
It's in the plans.
We just held a big Gulf Reef Symposium last November
and brought in scientists from all over
to help us come up with our science goals
for the next five to 10 years
and to figure out what it is we need to look at.
So we know that coral bleaching
is specifically those symbiotic algae leaving the coral.
So that is not something that happens at depth
because there are not those same kinds of symbiotic algae
in the mesophotic reefs necessarily
in the Flower Garden Banks.
There are some, but that's not the majority.
And so there are probably effects
from the rising temperatures, but not the same way,
not in the form of coral bleaching necessarily.
And so these are all things we're gonna have to figure out
how to monitor and how to understand
because those are areas we really are lacking in data
and we recognize those data gaps
and we are working on ways with our research partners
across the country and from around the world
because the staff at Flower Garden Banks,
we monitor the reefs,
but it's other people that actually do the research.
We provide the permits and sometimes the staff to go with
and the ship to go out on,
but a lot of that research takes
place through other entities
and so those are things that we are working on.
But, there's no specific plan in place as yet.
Well, thank you very much, Nicole.
We appreciate you being here this evening
and answering all of these questions about coral bleaching,
ocean acidification, all the different kinds of monitoring
you all are doing with the NCRMP program.
And folks, if you'll hang on for just a few more minutes,
I'm going to wrap this up here.
Let me show you my screen again.
-: Thank you so much for having me.
-: Thank you for being here.
All right, folks,
thank you for being here yourselves.
We appreciate you attending our Seaside Chats presentation
on Climate Monitoring in the Flower Garden Banks
in the Florida Keys.
And this is just the first of three presentations
we're offering this month.
Please be sure to sign up for the remaining presentations
on February 21st and the 28th.
On February 21st, we'll be talking about Fish with Cchips,
not fish and chips, not something you eat,
something you watch and follow around
and that's what allows us to track their movements
on the reef and what we're learning from that.
And then on February 28th, we'll be Chasing Microbes
and trying to understand more about how researchers
are unraveling the mysteries of coral disease.
So we hope you'll join us for those two presentations.
And then we want to let you know that
with the remaining questions,
we will attempt to get answers for you
after the webinar concludes.
Our staff here at the Flower Garden Banks
will answer whatever we can,
we'll pass the rest on to Nicole,
to the ones that are very specific to her presentation
and she has said she will help us out with those.
So hopefully within a week or so of this presentation,
we will have some answers back out to you.
And if you'd like to learn more on your own,
we have also provided a document full of resource links
in the handout pane of the control panel.
If you haven't yet downloaded it from the control panel,
now would be a very good time to do that.
And as always, we welcome your feedback and questions.
You can submit input by replying to the follow-up email
you'll receive after the webinar
or by emailing us directly at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
Today's presentation has also been part
of the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series.
And while Seaside Chats last just one month,
our national webinar series continues throughout the year
to provide you with educational and scientific expertise,
resources and training to support
ocean and climate literacy.
Be sure to check the website for recordings of past webinars
and the schedule of what's to come.
You don't have to write down
what you're seeing on your screen right now.
It's on that handout that I just told you about.
And as a reminder, we will share the recording
of this webinar via our website
as well as the National Marine Sanctuaries website,
where they have the whole webinar series.
You can go back and watch whatever presentations
you'd like and missed before.
Following this webinar,
attendees will also receive a PDF copy
of a certificate of attendance.
This provides documentation for one hour
of professional development for today's presentation.
This document includes our Texas CPE provider number
for those of you who are Texas educators.
And if you are an educator outside of Texas,
please use this certificate
to help get your hours approved in your district.
If you require additional information,
please contact me at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
There will also be a short evaluation
following today's presentation
that should only take about three minutes to complete.
And we'd greatly appreciate any feedback
you are willing to share.
And that, my friends, concludes today's Seaside Chat.
Thank you for joining us.