El Nino Impacted Coral Reefs in the Tropical Eastern Pacific: Secondary Disturbances, Recovery and Effects on Community Diversity and Reef Growth

该项目将长期的研究，重点是生态干扰，原因，以及东太平洋珊瑚礁珊瑚种群和珊瑚礁群落的反应期间和之后的严重和历史上前所未有的1982 - 1983年厄尔尼诺/南方涛动（ENSO）事件。这项研究涉及强有力的国际合作，东道国的研究小组在哥斯达黎加，巴拿马，和加拉帕戈斯群岛（厄瓜多尔），所有地区受到严重影响，在1982 - 1983年厄尔尼诺/南方涛动扰动的几个实地工作。这项研究将继续进行：（a）监测1970年代初期至中期开始的东太平洋珊瑚礁的物理和生物条件，（B）调查不同珊瑚物种对厄尔尼诺/南方涛动压力的反应（c）研究珊瑚繁殖生态学，因为它与实地调查中的成功补充有关，以及（d）记录珊瑚群落的恢复或变化，从而形成替代的非造礁群落。1994年开始的新的研究方向将继续进行，即（e）试图将珊瑚漂白/死亡与当地和全球范围的海表温度异常联系起来，（f）根据从实地监测和实验结果得出的温度、捕食、珊瑚生长和生存之间的机械关系，模拟珊瑚种群的大小结构和珊瑚群落的动态。此外，还将研究（g）分析在东太平洋珊瑚中发现的不同虫黄藻分类群的分子遗传结构，以评估虫黄藻多样性在解释珊瑚漂白模式的可变性方面的重要性，以及（h）恢复珊瑚种群，以评估其遗传结构和多样性与种群规模和与来源种群的距离之间的关系。

This project will long term study that has focused on ecological disturbances, causes, and the responses of eastern Pacific reef coral populations and reef communities during and following the severe and historically unprecedented 1982 1983 El Nino / Southrn Oscillation (ENSO) event. This study involves strong international collaboration with host country research teams working at several field sites in Costa Rica, Panama, and the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), all areas that were severely affected during the 1982 1983 ENSO disturbance. This study will continue with (a) monitoring the physical and biological conditions of eastern Pacific coral reefs initiated in the early to mid 1970s, (b) investigating the responses of different coral species to ENSO stressors (chiefly positive sea temperature anomalies) under controlled microcosm conditions, (c) studying coral reproductive ecology as it relates to recruitment success in field surveys, and (d) documenting coral community recovery or changes leading to alternate, non reef building communities. New research directions initiated in 1994 will be pursued, namely (e) an attempt to link coral bleaching/mortality with local and global scale sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, and (f) modeling the size structure of coral populations and coral community dynamics based on mechanistic relationships between temperature, predation, coral growth, and survivorship derived from field monitoring and experimental results. In addition, (g) analyses of the molecular genetic structure of the different zooxanthella taxa found in eastern Pacific corals to assess the importance of zooxanthellae diversity in explaining the variability in patterns of coral bleaching, and (h) recovering coral populations, to assess their genetic structure and diversity in relation to population size and distance from source populations, will be investigated.