According to a study published recently in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – Biological Sciences, just one-third of the coral reefs ecosystems in Hawai‘i are dominated by healthy corals and calcareous algae. The study also identified the key stressors of these reef systems, including declines in herbivorous fish abundance, ocean temperature, and pollution run-off from land. “While some algal cover is natural on Hawaiian reefs, it is unexpected to find that turf algae dominate more than half of all reefs we examined,” said lead author Jean-Baptiste Jouffray of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. Lisa Wedding, a Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) grad student, is also a co-author.

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