Coral Reef Biogeochemistry and Remote Sensing Laboratory

PI:  M J Atkinson

Welcome to the Coral Reef Biogeochemistry and Remote Sensing Laboratory at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii.

Coral reefs are comprised of a variety of different benthic communities that interact to form characteristic physical structures (links to remote sensing images of reefs). Benthic communities of coral reefs also have characteristic metabolic rates of the biogeochemically active compounds (such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and organic metabolites).  The central goal of our laboratory is to understand the processes that control and govern these biogeochemical rates, so we may better model the behavior of reef ecosystems under different environmental conditions.  

Our approach is to study these governing processes of different reef communities in both the laboratory and field. Our focus is on the community scale, not necessarily the physiology of a single organism.  The processes that govern biogeochemistry at larger scales can be very different than those of a smaller scale.

Over the past fifteen years we have built three flumes ranging from 10-20 m long so we can control the size and type of experimental benthic communities, water motion, water chemistry, and light quantity and quality. We use the flumes to correctly understand and parameterize the biogeochemical rates, and then we find specific reefs to test our understanding. We visit and study reefs in Hawaii and all over the world.

We study how light is attenuated in the water column, and absorbed and reflected from the different organisms and communities of coral reefs. These studies allow us to develop techniques to image and map coral reefs from both airborne and space platforms. The understanding of light also helps in our studies of carbon production  and consumption.

We discovered fifteen years ago that the uptake and release rates of nutrients compounds are affected by the water velocity, thus we built the flumes to control water velocity. The most recent flume is our indoor wave flume, in which we studied the effects of waves on nutrient uptake.  Our lab is funded from with contracts and grants from NOAA, NASA, NSF, and ONR.

Current Projects:

Alliance for Coastal Technology - NOAA: Testing and evaluating sensors for coral reef moorings

Calibration for Remote Sensing of Reefs – NOAA: Evaluate techniques to map habitats and benthic communities of coral reefs.

Hyperspectral Imager for a Coastal Ocean, HICO – ONR:  Test techniques for imaging the coastal ocean with a space hyperspectral spectrometer

Are carbon and phosphate cycles coupled or uncoupled on coral reefs – NSF

Do waves enhance nutrient uptake of coral reef benthos? - NSF

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