Long-term changes in soft coral communities on shallow coral reefs

This proposal seeks Rapid Response funding for the 2017 sampling of a time-series analysis describing soft corals on shallow reefs in St. John, US Virgin Islands. The intellectual merit of the project lie in addressing how coral reefs will change in the future, but rather than focusing on the extensively-studied topic of the death of stony corals, it focuses on soft corals that are replacing stony corals in this location. My ongoing work provides a unique opportunity to describe this transition, as my students and I have been studying stony corals in St. John for 30 y. Recently we have analyzed 25 y of photographs to describe a gradual regime change in community structure favoring soft corals over stony corals. A limitation of this analysis is that soft corals cannot be identified to species in photographs, and with NSF support in 2014, we started in-water analysis to identify soft corals to species. At the end of this grant (May 2017) we have 3 y of data with which trends can be described, but the time series remains too sparse for rigorous analyses. An application for renewal to NSF recently was declined, and with the next submission due in August 2017 (for research in 2018), there is an urgent need to support 2017 surveys to maintain the integrity of the time-series, and test the hypothesis that soft corals communities are differentially changing relative to stony corals. This COAST proposal requests $7,500 that will be used for graduate support to conduct a 1-month fieldtrip to St. John, analyze data at CSUN, maintain competitiveness for NSF support, and promote graduate research leading to the MS degree. A grant submission for ~$500k will be submitted to NSF concurrent with the fieldwork supported by this application.