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Assessing coral health in the Kingdom of Tonga with a coral health index
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2021
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Source: Platax
[PDF-1.15 MB]
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Journal Title:Platax
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Description:Reef coral health is currently diagnosed retroactively; once corals bleach or become diseased, we assume they had been experiencing high stress levels. This would be akin to telling one who suffered a cardiac arrest that he/she had high blood pressure; ideally, an individual's susceptibility to a heart attack would be known in advance of such a late-stage, life-threatening event. However, sub-lethal means of assessing coral health do not yet exist, and the preferred health metric, growth, cannot be reliably measured while on research cruises, where most, if not all, reef sites are surveyed and sampled only once. Since it would be preferable to make diagnostic inferences from a single biopsy, a new parameter known as the ＂coral health index＂ (CHI; 氣) was devised herein. The CHI, which represents an amalgamation of several response variables known to scale directly with coral resilience (e.g., dinoflagellate endosymbiont density), was profiled across multiple environmental gradients in the Kingdom of Tonga. Machine learning (i.e., AI) models were developed such that the CHI could be predicted from more commonly assessed environmental (e.g., salinity) and ecological (e.g., coral cover) benchmarks. Models for two pocilloporid coral species were characterized by validation R^2 values approaching 1, meaning that this AI could be used to delineate relative levels of coral resilience on a pre-bleaching timescale.
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Source:Platax
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Rights Information:Accepted Manuscript
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Compliance:Submitted
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