Bertarelli-Annual-Report-2023-R9-low (1) - Flipbook - Page 35
Our Impacts in 2022
Monitoring shallow
coral reef exposure to
environmental stressors
using satellite earth
observation: the reef
environmental stress
exposure toolbox
Williamson, M.J., Tebbs, E.J., Dawson, T.P., Thompson,
H.J., Head, C.E.I., Jacoby, D.M.P. (2022) ‘Monitoring
shallow coral reef exposure to environmental stressors using
satellite earth observation: the reef environmental stress
exposure toolbox (RESET)’
– Remote Sensing Ecology and Conservation
https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.286
This paper is led by one of the programme’s PhD students
and uses satellite technology to monitor some of the
world’s most remote and vulnerable coral reefs and, for
the first time, observe multiple climate change related
stressors from open-source data. The team created a
Reef Environmental Stress Exposure Toolbox (RESET)
from the readily available Google Earth Engine geospatial
processing platform.
Marine Science 2022
34
Using the satellite data to collate nine environmental
variables (cloud cover, current, depth, salinity, wind,
and four sea surface temperature-based metrics), they
were able to map out combinations of environmental
stressors caused by climate change and monitor the
reefs all-year-round.
Data were used from 3,157 coral reef locations around the
globe, including twelve major ocean ecosystem regions.
These included the Chagos Archipelago, coral reefs off the
coast of the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific and in the
Red Sea. To test the capabilities of RESET, occurrences
of El Niño were used to test the toolkit’s ability to capture
variability during these extreme climatic events which
are well known for damaging reefs by coral bleaching.
By comparing coral reefs at times when El Niño occurred
with ‘usual’ conditions the study found that depth, degree
heating weeks, and sea surface temperature anomalies
were the potential drivers of inter- and intra-region
variation in environmental stress exposure.
RESET provides an open access, easily interpretable set of
tools and associated indices for monitoring environmental
stress exposure on coral reefs and is designed to inform
conservation and management decisions. As such,
RESET has broad potential to assist in the monitoring of
imperilled coral ecosystems, in particular, those that are
remote or inaccessible.