Maintaining healthy, productive ecosystems in the face of pervasive and accelerating human impacts including climate change requires globally coordinated and sustained observations of marine biodiversity. Global coordination is predicated on an understanding of the scope and capacity of existing monitoring programs, and the extent to which they use standardized, interoperable practices for data management. Global coordination...

Decadal populations changes in four coral taxa and their patterns of association with algal symbionts ( Symbiodinium spp. – 10 years of sampling) were examined on Kenyan back reefs over a period of climatic disturbances (1991−2009). Some of the better surviving taxa, Pavona and Pocillopora , were associated with variable temperature regimes and >50% of sampled colonies in these taxa had some of the more thermally tolerant Symb...