Major environmental drivers determining life and death of cold-water corals through time

DOI

Cold-water corals are the engineers of complex ecosystems forming unique biodiversity hot spots in the deep sea. They are expected to suffer dramatically from future environmental changes in the oceans such as ocean warming, food depletion, deoxygenation and acidification. However, during the instrumental era no collapse of a cold-water coral ecosystem is documented, leaving quite some uncertainty on their sensitivity to these environmental stressors. Paleoceanographic reconstructions offer the opportunity to align the on- and offsets of cold-water coral proliferation to environmental parameters. Here, we present the synthesis of six case studies from the North Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea revealing that food supply controlled by export production and turbulent hydrodynamics at the seabed exerted the strongest impact on coral vitality during the past 20,000 years, whereas locally low oxygen concentrations in the bottom-water can act as an additional relevant stressor. The fate of cold-water corals in a changing ocean will largely depend on how these oceanographic processes will be modulated. Future ocean deoxygenation may be compensated regionally where the food delivery and food quality are optimal.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.932775
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001628
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.932775
Provenance
Creator Portilho-Ramos, Rodrigo Costa ORCID logo; Titschack, Jürgen ORCID logo; Wienberg, Claudia ORCID logo; Siccha, Michael ORCID logo; Yokoyama, Yusuke ORCID logo; Hebbeln, Dierk ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2021
Funding Reference Horizon 2020 https://doi.org/10.13039/501100007601 Crossref Funder ID 678760 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/678760 A Trans-Atlantic assessment and deep-water ecosystem-based spatial management plan for Europe; Horizon 2020 https://doi.org/10.13039/501100007601 Crossref Funder ID 818123 https://doi.org/10.3030/818123 Integrated Assessment of Atlantic Marine Ecosystems in Space and Time
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Bundled Publication of Datasets; Collection
Format application/zip
Size 11 datasets
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-87.150W, 18.957S, -2.554E, 52.156N)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2000-09-18T10:57:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2014-02-28T11:58:00Z