Since the start of 2023, experts have been seeking out factors that show which reefs bounce back from environmental stress, as well as how quickly they recover. Lauren Olinger, a research associate with the Virgin Islands Reef Resilience Study (VIRRS), said reefs around the U.S. Virgin Islands suffered a massive coral bleaching event in 2005. Preliminary findings show some signs of recovery appearing in some places, Olinger said, but rates of recovery differ from site to site.
“We know the reefs are facing a lot of issues right now,” Olinger said. Currently, sustained higher ocean water temperatures caused by climate change are creating a thermal stress event. As a result, observers say, the undersea landscape has changed.
Typical changes that show up include sparser coral cover over the sea floor. Using data that’s been collected since the early 2000s, VIRRS researchers are measuring the levels of recovery in reefs in the shallow nearshore areas as well as deeper shelves surrounding the territory, said UVI Marine Science Research Professor Tyler Smith.
“We’re looking both at the response of coral — either by cover, or density, by some metric of the coral at (sic) sites, and then there are. The drivers are factors that affect the resilience over time, and those are the factors we are looking at in the study,” Smith said.
“And they could be anything; we’ve divided them into internal and external drivers. External would be temperatures; they’d be currents, they’d be waves — things that are happening on the outside that affect the reef, but the reef doesn’t affect them,” he said.
The objectives of a Coral Reef Resilience Study that began earlier this year were discussed at a workshop held in November on UVI’s Orville Kean Campus. About 40 attendees from federal agencies, such as the Department of Planning and Natural Resources, Louisiana State University, and California State University at Northridge came to hear what UVI researchers had found so far, and what they still want to explore.
“The workshop was to update everyone on the progress made so far, discuss the gaps in data needed to finalize the study, and chart the course to finalization of the study and the outputs,” Smith said.
Notes, data and images drawn from the study and now making their way into a VIRRS internal reference website. Included on the site, Smith said, are Virgin Islands research archives dating back some 30 years. “Lauren developed is the nexus for that. So she’s developed this website — the VIRRF website. I don’t think it’s open access, but it will list all the sites for which we have data. Right there are about 50 coral reef long-term research sites,” the research professor said.
Language on the website explains the value of creating a repository for past and present observations.
“Coastal managers in the U.S. Virgin Islands want to identify local coral reefs that may be resilient to long-term climate effects, as well as shorter-term chronic impacts such as coral disease. This information will allow managers to better prioritize, evaluate, and target conservation actions,” says a link on the site titled Why We Care.
The study is supported with funding from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Coastal Ocean Science.
