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Media ReleaseOcean breakthrough onglobal warmingA major discovery in Program 1 has opened the way for researchers to measure the ability ofthe world’s oceans to absorb man-made CO 2- a key factor in global warming. The discoveryby Professor Malcolm McCulloch, deputy director of the Australian Research Council Centre ofExcellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and colleagues from Italian research institutionsled by Dr Paolo Montagna, will allow researchers to see far into the past to understand thebiological and chemical makeup of the oceans. This may solve one of the biggest questionsfacing global warming: whether or not the oceans can keep pace with human CO 2output.Professor McCulloch’s findings are published in 2006 in the international journal Science. They reveal a wayto calculate the amount of phosphorus, a nutrient of vital importance to all life.“Now that we have this tool we can look more closely at the role of nutrients in the ocean and try andunderstand, in a lot more detail, how they operated in the past,” says Prof. McCulloch. “We can now fi ndout how the oceans responded to previous increases in carbon dioxide (CO 2) and how quickly they canabsorb it,” he says.The tool could help answer one of the biggest questions in the global warming debate: whether the‘biologic pump’, through which the oceans naturally absorb CO ²from the atmosphere, can keep pace withthe vast amounts now being produced by humans.Plants and animals in the oceans’ surface waters drive the ‘biologic pump’ by taking up much of the CO 2from the air and storing it inside their bodies. Eventually the CO ²stored in their bodies descends to thedeep ocean and becomes part of the sea fl oor. The turbulent mixing of the oceans also helps to absorb CO 2.Scientists fear that if the ‘biologic pump’ cannot keep up with human CO 2emissions, the waters of theoceans will become more acid. This could hinder the growth of coral reefs, and may also be detrimental toother plants and animals that are critical to the operation of biological pump, which could ultimately lead tothe collapse of one of the main systems that helps to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.The more plants and animals in the ocean the more productive it becomes and the more the ‘biologicpump’ can absorb greenhouse gases. The productivity of an area of ocean is indicated by the amount ofphosphorus in it. “Phosphorus is a key nutrient in the ocean that limits or controls biological productivity.Organisms use it up and because there is only so much available, there is a limit to how many organismsthere can be,” explains Prof. McCulloch.“We can go back in time and look at the past history of the earth and look at how it reacted,” saysMcCulloch, “This complements ongoing studies of our oceans, because the dilemma is that you often don’tknow whether we are in an irreversible situation till after it has happened, so we try to better understandthese processes by looking at how the planet has responded in the past.”This view into the past is made possible because of Prof. McCulloch’s discovery that the preservedskeletons of ancient deep sea corals store phosphorous in exactly the same amounts as the surroundingoceans. By using sophisticated and accurate dating methods on the corals he can piece togetherinformation on the oceans as far back as the last glacial period, nearly 20 000 years ago.Prof. McCulloch plans to use the newly discovered tool in future studies to provide a ‘health check-up’of the biologic pump in order to see whether it will be able to keep up with the rate of greenhouse gasemissions from humans.5 July 200615
Program 2:Understanding andManaging Coral ReefBiodiversityResearchersDavid Bellwood (Program Leader)Andrew Baird (Research Fellow)Sean ConnollyTerry Hughes (Research Fellow)Geoffrey JonesRonald KarlsonPippa Moore (Research Fellow)Philip Munday (Research Fellow)John PandolfiMorgan Pratchett (Research Fellow)Robert SteneckThough widely recognized as a criticalfactor for the maintenance of robustecosystems, biodiversity at local andglobal scales is poorly understood.Program 2 aims to understand themechanisms and processes that maintaincoral reef biodiversity, using a combinationof mathematical modeling and fieldstudies. This multi-disciplinary approachinforms knowledge-based managementof biodiversity resulting in environmental,social and economic benefit to tropicalmaritime nations.Australian Research Fellow, PhilipMunday, in collaboration with colleaguesat the University of California SantaBarbara, has identified the mechanismsunderlying the diverse sexual strategiesin sex-changing fishes. Munday’s 2006research, published in Proceedings of theRoyal Society, showed that the interplaybetween genes and the environment earlyin life plays a key role in which individualsbecome primary males or females. Thisresearch contributes to the increasingappreciation of the diversity and flexibilityof sexual strategies in fishes.In a related study, Mark McCormick foundthat stressed fish have smaller offspring,with lower chances of survival. Theability to cope with stress – and producelarge, healthy fry – determines whichfemales contribute to future generationsand influences the resilience of fishpopulations. Mark and Geoff Jones havesecured a 3-year contract with the NatureConservancy to monitor coral reef health,biodiversity and fisheries resources in 4local marine reserves in Kimbe Bay, PapuaNew Guinea. The project will analyze theefficiency of current marine conservationefforts and use this data to implementfuture marine conservation strategies inthe Bay.The increasing violence of storms underglobal climate change will have majoreffects on coral reefs – and has importantimplications for their future management.In a paper in Nature, JCU graduateJoshua Madin and Sean Connolly usemathematical models to calculate theforces that coral is subjected to by wave,storm surge or tsunami, and the probabilityof the colonies being dislodged from thesea-bed. These new models provide anessential tool to predict how coral reefswill look under different future scenarios,and to plan accordingly.Understanding, predicting and managingthe potential impacts of climate changeon coral reef ecosystems is a major focusof many of the Centre’s projects. In 2006,Program 2 researchers examined theeffects of climate-induced coral depletionon coral reef fishes, in collaborationwith colleagues from the University ofNewcastle-upon-Tyne and UC SantaBarbara. Work was conducted in Australia,Fiji, French Polynesia, PNG, and atseveral locations in the Indian Ocean,highlighting a new area of expertisewithin the ARC Centre. For example, ateam led by Australian Research FellowMorgan Pratchett documented significantpopulation declines and localizedextinctions of coral-feeding butterflyfisheson the Great Barrier Reef, following coralbleaching. Morgan and Andrew Bairdalso gave a series of briefings in 2006to the Western Australia oil and gasindustry, on a range of issues, includingthe use of coral spawning predictionsfor management, the scale of spatialstock-recruitment relationships, and theconsequences of recruitment failure ofcoral reef organisms.A series of high-profile publications in2006 and 2007 demonstrate that fishwill play a vital role in the response ofAustralia’s Great Barrier Reef to climatechange. A team of 8 researchers fromProgram 2 and 5, led by Centre DirectorTerry Hughes, undertook a large-scalefish-exclusion experiment to explore therole of herbivorous fishes in bolstering theresilience of corals to global warming.The experiment tracked the recovery ofcorals following severe bleaching, in areasof reef where fish were experimentallyexcluded, and on adjacent areas withina no-fishing zone. In the absence of fish,the corals failed to recover, and instead aphase-shift occurred from dominance bycorals to a reef covered by dense standsof seaweed. Where fish were abundant,coral cover more than doubled, and noalgal bloom occurred. The team concludedthat maintaining intact fish populationswill be vital to successfully managing theresilience of tropical coral reefs from theimpacts of climate change and humanactivity. These results strongly supportmanagement strategies of the GreatBarrier Reef Marine Park Authority andother coral reef agencies worldwide. Theimportance of this project is accentuatedby the findings of the April 6 th 2007 reportof the IPCC, which the ARC Centre ofExcellence contributed to.16
Page 1 and 2: 2006 Annual Report
Page 4: VisionGlobal leadership in the prov
Page 7 and 8: Management StructureCentre Advisory
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