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Peer reviewed research is paramount to the advancement of science. Ideally, the peer review process is an unbiased, fair assessment of the scientific merit and credibility of a study; however, well-documented biases arise in all methods of peer review. Systemic biases have been shown to directly impact the outcomes of peer review, yet little is known about the downstream impacts of unprofessional reviewer comments that are shared with authors. In an anonymous survey of international participants in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, we investigated the pervasiveness and author perceptions of long-term implications of receiving of unprofessional comments. Specifically, we assessed authors' perceptions of scientific aptitude, productivity, and career trajectory after receiving an unprofessional peer review. We show that survey respondents across four intersecting categories of gender and race/ethnicity received unprofessional peer review comments equally. However, traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM fields were most likely to perceive negative impacts on scientific aptitude, productivity, and career advancement after receiving an unprofessional peer review. Studies show that a negative perception of aptitude leads to lowered self-confidence, short-term disruptions in success and productivity and delays in career advancement. Therefore, our results indicate that unprofessional reviews likely have and will continue to perpetuate the gap in STEM fields for traditionally underrepresented groups in the sciences.

Coral bleaching is the detrimental expulsion of algal symbionts from their cnidarian hosts, and predominantly occurs when corals are exposed to thermal stress. The incidence and severity of bleaching is often spatially heterogeneous within reef-scales (<1 km), and is therefore not predictable using conventional remote sensing products. Here, we systematically assess the relationship between in situ measurements of 20 environmental variables, along with seven remotely sensed SST thermal stress metrics, and 81 observed bleaching events at coral reef locations spanning five major reef regions globally. We find that high-frequency temperature variability (i.e., daily temperature range) was the most influential factor in predicting bleaching prevalence and had a mitigating effect, such that a 1 °C increase in daily temperature range would reduce the odds of more severe bleaching by a factor of 33. Our findings suggest that reefs with greater high-frequency temperature variability may represent particularly important opportunities to conserve coral ecosystems against the major threat posed by warming ocean temperatures. Coral bleaching is often predicted via remote sensing of ocean temperatures at large scales, obscuring important reef-scale drivers and biological responses. Here, the authors use in- situ data to show that bleaching is lower globally at reef habitats with greater diurnal temperature variability.

Success and impact metrics in science are based on a system that perpetuates sexist and racist “rewards” by prioritizing citations and impact factors. These metrics are flawed and biased against already marginalized groups and fail to accurately capture the breadth of individuals’ meaningful scientific impacts. We advocate shifting this outdated value system to advance science through principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. We outline pathways for a paradigm shift in scientific values based on multidimensional mentorship and promoting mentee well-being. These actions will require collective efforts supported by academic leaders and administrators to drive essential systemic change.

Spatial and temporal environmental variability are important drivers of ecological processes at all scales. As new tools allow the in situ exploration of individual responses to fluctuations, ecologically meaningful ways of characterizing environmental variability at organism scales are needed. We investigated the fine-scale spatial heterogeneity of high-frequency temporal variability in temperature, dissolved oxygen concentration, and pH experienced by benthic organisms in a shallow coastal coral reef. We used a spatio-temporal sampling design, consisting of 21 short-term time-series located along a reef flat-to-reef slope transect, coupled to a long-term station monitoring water column changes. Spectral analyses revealed sharp gradients in variance decomposed by frequency, as well as differences between physically-driven and biologically-reactive parameters. These results highlight the importance of environmental variance at organismal scales and present a new sampling scheme for exploring this variability in situ.

Temperature drives biological responses that scale from the cellular to ecosystem levels and thermal sensitivity will shape organismal functions and population dynamics as the world warms. Reef-building corals are sensitive to temperature due to their endosymbiotic relationship with single-celled dinoflagellates, with mass mortality events increasing in frequency and magnitude. The purpose of this study was to quantify the thermal sensitivity of important physiological functions of a Caribbean reef-building coral, Orbicella franksi, through the measurement of thermal performance curves (TPCs). We compared TPC metrics (thermal optimum, critical maximum, activation energy, deactivation energy, and rate at a standardized temperature) between two populations at the northern and southern extents of the geographic range of O. franksi. We further compared essential coral organismal processes (gross photosynthesis, respiration, and calcification) within a site to determine which function is most sensitive to thermal stress using a hierarchical Bayesian-modeling approach. We found evidence for differences in thermal performance, which could be due to thermal adaptation or acclimatization, with higher TPC metrics (thermal optimum and critical maximum) in warmer Panama, compared to cooler Bermuda. We also documented the hierarchy in thermal sensitivity of essential organismal functions within a population: respiration was less sensitive than photosynthesis, which was less sensitive than calcification. Understanding thermal performance of corals is essential for projecting coral reef futures, given that key biological functions necessary to sustain coral reef ecosystems are thermally mediated.

Coral reefs experience numerous natural and anthropogenic environmental gradients that alter biophysical conditions and affect biodiversity. While many studies have focused on drivers of reef biodiversity using traditional diversity metrics (e.g., species richness, diversity, evenness), less is known about how environmental variability may influence functional diversity. In this study, we tested the impact of submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) on taxonomic and functional diversity metrics in Mo‘orea, French Polynesia. SGD is the expulsion of terrestrial fresh or recirculated seawater into marine environments and is associated with reduced temperatures, pH, and salinity and elevated nutrient levels. Using a regression approach along the SGD gradient, we found that taxon and functional-entity richness displayed unimodal relationships to SGD parameters, primarily nitrate + nitrite and phosphate variability, with peak richness at moderate SGD for stony coral and the full benthic community. Macroalgae showed this unimodal pattern for functional-entity but not taxonomic richness. Functional community composition (presence and abundance of functional entities) increased along the gradient, while taxonomic composition showed a nonlinear relationship to SGD-related parameters. SGD is a common feature of many coastal ecosystems globally and therefore may be more important to structuring benthic functional diversity than previously thought. Further, studying community shifts through a functional-trait lens may provide important insights into the roles of community functions on ecosystem processes and stability, leading to improved management strategies.

The resilience of coral reefs depends on the balance between reef growth and reef breakdown, and their responses to changing environmental conditions. Across the 2500-km Hawaiian Archipelago, we quantified rates of carbonate production, bioerosion, and net accretion at regional, island, site, and within-site spatial scales and tested how these rates respond to environmental conditions across different spatial scales. Overall, there were four major outcomes from this study: (1) bioerosion rates were generally higher in the populated Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI) than the remote, protected Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI), while carbonate production rates did not vary significantly between the two regions; (2) variability in carbonate production, bioerosion, and net accretion rates was greatest at the smallest within-reef spatial scale; (3) carbonate production and bioerosion rates were associated with distinct sets of environmental parameters; and (4) the strongest correlates of carbonate production, bioerosion, and net accretion rates were different between the MHI region and the NWHI region: in the MHI, the dominant correlates were percent cover of macroalgae and herbivorous fish biomass for carbonate production and bioerosion, respectively, whereas in the NWHI, the top correlates were total alkalinity and benthic cover. This study highlights the need to understand accretion and erosion processes as well as local environmental conditions to predict net coral reef responses to future environmental changes.

Corals build reefs through accretion of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) skeletons, but net reef growth also depends on bioerosion by grazers and borers and on secondary calcification by crustose coralline algae and other calcifying invertebrates. However, traditional field methods for quantifying secondary accretion and bioerosion confound both processes, do not measure them on the same time-scale, or are restricted to 2D methods. In a prior study, we compared multiple environmental drivers of net erosion using pre- and post-deployment micro-computed tomography scans (μCT; calculated as the % change in volume of experimental CaCO3 blocks) and found a shift from net accretion to net erosion with increasing ocean acidity. Here, we present a novel μCT method and detail a procedure that aligns and digitally subtracts pre- and post-deployment μCT scans and measures the simultaneous response of secondary accretion and bioerosion on blocks exposed to the same environmental variation over the same time-scale. We tested our method on a dataset from a prior study and show that it can be used to uncover information previously unattainable using traditional methods. We demonstrated that secondary accretion and bioerosion are driven by different environmental parameters, bioerosion is more sensitive to ocean acidity than secondary accretion, and net erosion is driven more by changes in bioerosion than secondary accretion.

Reef-building corals can harbour high abundances of diverse invertebrate epifauna. Coral characteristics and environmental conditions are important drivers of community structure of coral-associated invertebrates; however, our current understanding of drivers of epifaunal distributions is still unclear. This study tests the relative importance of the physical environment (current flow speed) and host quality (e.g., colony height, surface area, distance between branches, penetration depth among branches, and background partial mortality) in structuring epifaunal communities living within branching Pocillopora colonies on a back reef in Moorea, French Polynesia. A total of 470 individuals belonging to four phyla, 16 families and 39 genera were extracted from 36 Pocillopora spp. colonies. Decapods were the most abundant epifaunal organisms (accounting for 84% of individuals) found living in Pocillopora spp. While coral host characteristics and flow regime are very important, these parameters were not correlated with epifaunal assemblages at the time of the study. Epifaunal assemblages associated with Pocillopora spp. were consistent and minimally affected by differences in host characteristics and flow regime. The consistency in abundance and taxon richness among colonies (regardless of habitat characteristics) highlighted the importance of total habitat availability. With escalating effects of climate change and other localized disturbances, it is critical to preserve branching corals to support epifaunal communities.

Work on marine biofilms has primarily focused on host-associated habitats for their roles in larval recruitment and disease dynamics; little is known about the factors regulating the composition of reef environmental biofilms. To contrast the roles of succession, benthic communities and nutrients in structuring marine biofilms, we surveyed bacteria communities in biofilms through a six-week succession in aquaria containing macroalgae, coral, or reef sand factorially crossed with three levels of continuous nutrient enrichment. Our findings demonstrate how biofilm successional trajectories diverge from temporal dynamics of the bacterioplankton and how biofilms are structured by the surrounding benthic organisms and nutrient enrichment. We identify a suite of biofilm-associated bacteria linked with the orthogonal influences of corals, algae and nutrients and distinct from the overlying water. Our results provide a comprehensive characterization of marine biofilm successional dynamics and contextualize the impact of widespread changes in reef community composition and nutrient pollution on biofilm community structure.