Missing the Reef for the Corals: Unexpected Trends Between Coral Reef Condition and the Environment at the Ecosystem Scale

It is incontrovertible that many coral reefs are in various stages of decline and may be unable to withstand the effects of global climate change, jeopardizing vital ecosystem goods and services to hundreds of millions of people around the world. An estimated 50% of the world's corals have already been lost, and those remaining may be lost by 2030 under the “business as usual” CO2 emissions scenario. However, the foundation of these predictions is a surprisingly sparse dataset, wherein ~0.01–0.1% of the world's reef area has been quantitatively surveyed. Further, the available data comprise observations at the 1–10 m scale, which are not evenly spaced across reefs, but often clustered in areas representing focused survey effort. This impedes modeling and predicting the impact of a changing environment at the ecosystem scale. Here we highlight deficiencies in our current understanding of the relationship between coral reefs and their environments. Specifically, we conduct a meta-analysis using estimates of coral cover from a variety of local surveys, quantitatively relating reef condition to a suite of biogeophysical forcing parameters. We find that readily available public data for coral cover exhibit unexpected trends (e.g., a positive correlation between coral cover and multi-year cumulative thermal stress), contrary to prevailing scientific expectations. We illustrate a significant gap in our current understanding, and thereby prediction, of coral reefs at the ecosystem scale that can only be remedied with uniform, high-density data across vast coral reef regions, such as that from remote sensing.