Potential range expansion of scleractinian corals in high-latitude reefs is critically dependent on the coral host-symbiont relationship that determines coral growth and survival. Although increases in coral cover have been observed at higher latitudes, the identities of habitat-building reef corals and their symbionts are underreported. Here, we examine how scleractinian host and symbiont Symbiodiniaceae diversity changes alo...

Indonesia has experienced significant mangrove loss due to aquaculture expansion, particularly for shrimp farming, leading to the degradation of habitats and critical ecosystem services such as carbon storage, coastal protection, and fish spawning grounds. Ecosystem based aquaculture approaches offer a pathway to both mitigate environmental impacts and support sustainable seafood production. Here we explore the implementation...

A good understanding of biotic interactions is necessary to accurately predict the vulnerability of ecosystems to climate change. Recently, co‐occurrence networks built from environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding data have arisen as a tool to explore interspecific interactions in ecological communities exposed to different human and environmental pressures. Such networks can identify environmentally driven relationships in mic...

The role of species interactions in setting species range limits is rarely empirically explored. Here, we quantify host and parasite densities in subtropical eastern Australia (26.65°–30.20°S) to examine whether parasitism might contribute to range limitation of Acropora corals at their cold-range boundary. 79% of Acropora corals had endolithic barnacles (family Pyrgomatidae), with higher parasite load in larger corals and up...

Global warming causes functional shifts and reorganisation in marine communities through range shifts to high-latitude reefs and cnidarian bleaching mortality in the tropics. Such changes threaten the integrity and structure of marine communities, especially as foundational and associated species are reduced or lost. However, comparatively little is known about the extent of range shifts and their ecological consequences for t...

Aims Transformation of species and functional composition on subtropical reefs are ongoing due to poleward range shifts of some tropical species, with largely unknown consequences to ecosystem functioning. Trait‐based approaches are powerful tools to quantify such changes. Here, we evaluated changes in the trait composition of coral‐associated fish assemblages along a tropical‐to‐temperate environmental gradient of ca. 1400 km...

Identifying locations of refugia from the thermal stresses of climate change for coral reefs and better managing them is one of the key recommendations for climate change adaptation. We review and summarize approximately 30 years of applied research focused on identifying climate refugia to prioritize the conservation actions for coral reefs under rapid climate change. We found that currently proposed climate refugia and the l...

The persistent exposure of coral assemblages to more variable abiotic regimes is assumed to augment their resilience to future climatic variability. Yet, while the determinants of coral population resilience across species remain unknown, we are unable to predict the winners and losers across reef ecosystems exposed to increasingly variable conditions. Using annual surveys of 3171 coral individuals across Australia and Japan (...

Climate change is driving rapid and widespread erosion of the environmental conditions that formerly supported species persistence. Existing projections of climate change typically focus on forecasts of acute environmental anomalies and global extinction risks. The current projections also frequently consider all species within a broad taxonomic group together without differentiating species‐specific patterns. Consequently, we...

Escalating climatic and anthropogenic pressures expose ecosystems worldwide to increasingly stochastic environments. Yet, our ability to forecast the responses of natural populations to this increased environmental stochasticity is impeded by a limited understanding of how exposure to stochastic environments shapes demographic resilience. Here, we test the association between local environmental stochasticity and the resilienc...

Scientists and managers rely on indicator taxa such as coral and macroalgal cover to evaluate the effects of human disturbance on coral reefs, often assuming a universally positive relationship between local human disturbance and macroalgae. Despite evidence that macroalgae respond to local stressors in diverse ways, there have been few efforts to evaluate relationships between specific macroalgae taxa and local human‐driven d...

Larval dispersal connectivity is typically integrated into spatial conservation decisions at regional or national scales, but implementing agencies struggle with translating these methods to local scales. We used larval dispersal connectivity at regional (hundreds of kilometers) and local (tens of kilometers) scales to aid in design of networks of no‐take reserves in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. We used Marxan with Connectiv...

Escalating climate impacts on coral reefs are increasingly expanding management goals beyond preserving biodiversity to also maintaining ecosystem functions. Morphological and ecological species traits can help assess changes within reef communities beyond taxonomic identities alone. However, our limited understanding of trait interactions between habitat-building corals and associated reef fishes and whether they are captured...

Larval dispersal is an important component of marine reserve networks. Two conceptually different approaches to incorporate dispersal connectivity into spatial planning of these networks exist, and it is an open question as to when either is most appropriate. Candidate reserve sites can be selected individually based on local properties of connectivity or on a spatial dependency‐based approach of selecting clusters of strongly...