Global projections of ecosystem responses to increasing climatic and anthropogenic pressures are needed to inform adaptation planning. However, data of appropriate spatiotemporal resolution are often not available to parameterize complex environmental processes at the global scale. Modeling approaches that can project the probability of ecosystem persistence when parameter uncertainty is high may offer a way forward. In partic...

Microbial communities underpin biogeochemical processes in Blue Carbon Ecosystems (BCEs); however, a comprehensive review of geographic patterns in microbial diversity, microbial functions, and distribution is currently lacking. Here, for the first time, we have analysed 70 years (1930–2020) of archaeal, bacterial, and fungal diversity and functions in mangrove, saltmarsh, and seagrass ecosystems to elucidate publication and g...

Marine protected and conserved areas (MPCAs) are promoted as an ecosystem‐based adaptation (EbA) approach to increase community and ecosystem resilience to climate change. However, traditional approaches to MPCA design typically do not consider climate risk or habitat condition under a climate threat. We used the Great Sea Reef (GSR) in Fiji as a case study to develop a land–sea prioritization framework that links modeled sedi...

The coastal environment is not managed in a way that considers the impact of cumulative threats, despite being subject to threats from all realms (marine, land, and atmosphere). Relationships between threats and species are often nonlinear; thus, current (linear) approaches to estimating the impact of threats may be misleading. We developed a data‐driven approach to assessing cumulative impacts on ecosystems and applied it to...

Mangroves and seagrasses are important nurseries for many marine species, and this function is linked to the complexity and context of these habitats in coastal seascapes. It is also connected to bathymetric features that influence habitat availability, and the accessibility of refuge habitats, but the significance of terrain variation for nursery function is unknown. To test whether seafloor terrain influences nursery functio...

Ecosystems remain under enormous pressure from multiple anthropogenic stressors. Manipulative experiments evaluating stressor interactions and impacts mostly apply stressors under static conditions without considering how variable stressor intensity (i.e. fluctuations) and synchronicity (i.e. timing of fluctuations) affect biological responses. We ask how variable stressor intensity and synchronicity, and interaction type, can...

Mobile underwater cameras, diver-operated or on underwater vehicles, have become popular for monitoring fisheries. Replacing divers with cameras has clear advantages, such as creating permanent records and accessing waters unavailable to divers. The use of cameras, however, typically produces large quantities of video that are time-consuming to process manually. Automated analysis of underwater videos from stationary cameras u...

Habitat complexity and connectivity can influence the number of species and their diversity across a landscape. For the surf zones of ocean-exposed beaches, globally one of the longest habitat interfaces, the assumed low structural complexity, and apparent homogeneity, of the sandy seafloor habitats predicts low taxonomic and functional diversity. Here, we assessed how the configuration of the seascape and the context of diffe...

Conservation of marine ecosystems has been highlighted as a priority to ensure a sustainable future. Effective management requires data collection over large spatio-temporal scales, readily accessible and integrated information from monitoring, and tools to support decision-making. However, there are many roadblocks to achieving adequate and timely information on both the effectiveness, and long-term success of conservation ef...

Oysters are ecosystem engineers that form biogenic reef habitats in shallow coastal and estuarine waters and provide important ecosystem services. Widespread global declines have triggered a world-wide restoration movement, however a paucity of information on tropical oyster reefs has resulted in their exclusion from existing global assessments and, consequently, restoration. In this review we quantified the known global diver...

Predicting the impacts of multiple stressors is important for informing ecosystem management but is impeded by a lack of a general framework for predicting whether stressors interact synergistically, additively or antagonistically. Here, we use process‐based models to study how interactions generalise across three levels of biological organisation (physiological, population and consumer‐resource) for a two‐stressor experiment...

The ongoing need to sustainably manage fishery resources can benefit from fishery-independent monitoring of fish stocks. Camera systems, particularly baited remote underwater video system (BRUVS), are a widely used and repeatable method for monitoring relative abundance, required for building stock assessment models. The potential for BRUVS-based monitoring is restricted, however, by the substantial costs of manual data extrac...

Climate change is altering naturally fluctuating environmental conditions in coastal and estuarine ecosystems across the globe. Departures from long-term averages and ranges of environmental variables are increasingly being observed as directional changes [e.g., rising sea levels, sea surface temperatures (SST)] and less predictable periodic cycles (e.g., Atlantic or Pacific decadal oscillations) and extremes (e.g., coastal fl...