The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

Cores from living coral colonies were collected from Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida, to obtain skeletal records of past coral growth and allow geochemical reconstruction of environmental variables during the corals’ centuries-long lifespans. The samples were collected as part of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies project (http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) that provides science to assist resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Three colonies ...

Massive corals are used as environmental recorders throughout the tropics and subtropics to study environmental variability during time periods preceding ocean-observing instrumentation. However, careful testing of paleoproxies is necessary to validate the environmental-proxy record throughout a range of conditions experienced by the recording organisms. As part of the USGS Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies project (http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/), we tested the hypothesis that the coral Siderastrea siderea ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

Staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, is a threatened species and the primary focus of western Atlantic reef-restoration efforts to date. As part of the USGS Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies project (http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/), scientists investigated skeletal characteristics of nursery-grown staghorn coral reared using two commonly used grow-out methods at Mote Tropical Research Laboratory’s offshore nursery. USGS staff compared linear extension, calcification rate, and skeletal density of nursery ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

The USGS Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. This data release contains data on coral-growth rates for Orbicella sp. coral colonies grown at five sites on the Florida Keys reef tract from 2013 to 2015, survey data for census-based carbonate budgeting at Hen and Chickens Reef (Islamorada, Florida) collected in 2017, and time-series photographs taken of permanent markers ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

The USGS Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. This data release contains data on coral-growth rates and time-series photographs taken of colonies of the elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, grown at five sites on the Florida Keys reef tract from Spring 2018 to Autumn 2019. The data will be used to inform resource managers of the capacity for restoration and growth of this ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. This data release contains data on coral-growth rates and time-series photographs taken of colonies of the mustard hill coral, Porites astreoides, grown at four sites on the Florida Keys reef tract from Spring 2015 to Spring 2017. The data will be used to inform resource managers on the spatial and ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps Department of Interior and other resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. This data release contains data on coral-growth rates and time-series photographs taken of colonies of the elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, and the symmetrical brain coral, Pseudodiploria strigosa, grown at three sites at Buck Island Reef National Monument in St. ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. Coral reef organisms are very sensitive to high and low water-temperature extremes. It is critical to precisely know water temperatures experienced by corals and associated plants and animals that live in the dynamic nearshore environment to document thresholds in temperature tolerance. This ...

This data release contains time-series photographs taken of corals and coral habitats in the Florida Keys between 1959 and 2015 at Carysfort Reef and Grecian Rocks (a total of six sites). The original intent was to show coral reef recovery after Hurricane Donna devastated the area in 1960. Corals, especially elkhorn and staghorn coral, grew prolifically after the storm until the late 1970s, then began to decline, with the maximum period of decline centered around 1983 and 1984. These time-series photographs ...

This data set includes: (1) allele sizes of 11 previously published microsatellites (Kenkel and others, 2013; Shearer and Coffroth, 2004) for 39 individuals of mustard hill coral, Porites astreoides (mustard hill coralP. astreoides) collected in the Spring of 2017 from four locations in the Florida Keys Reef Tract (FKRT): Fowey Rocks, Crocker Reef, Sombrero Reef and Pulaski Shoal and (2) the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) concentration of the extracted DNA prior to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) reactions for ...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coral Reef Ecosystems Studies (CREST) project (https://coastal.er.usgs.gov/crest/) provides science that helps Department of Interior and other resource managers tasked with the stewardship of coral reef resources. This data release contains data on coral physiology of the elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, grown at five sites along the Florida outer reef tract including in Biscayne National Park, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and Dry Tortugas National Park, ...

The USGS core archive (Reich and others, 2009; https://olga.er.usgs.gov/coreviewer/) houses an extensive collection of coral-reef cores that USGS researchers have collected from throughout the Florida Keys reef tract (FKRT). USGS scientists have compiled all available data on the 71 core records that recovered Holocene reef framework, including radiometric ages (radiocarbon and U-series), data on reef development (timing of reef initiation and senescence, reef accretion, and reef thickness) and geospatial ...

This data release provides a summary of the absolute percent composition of all recovered material and relative percent composition of coral taxa in the Holocene-aged intervals of 61 coral-reef cores collected throughout the Florida Keys reef tract (FKRT) housed in the USGS Core Archive in St. Petersburg, FL (Estimated ages for distinct depths within each core are also provided; those ages were either measured by radiometric dating of coral samples at those depths or estimated by linear interpolation ...

Coral reefs around the world have degraded over the last half-century as evidenced by loss of live coral cover. This ubiquitous observation led to the establishment of long-term, ecological monitoring programs in several regions with sizable coral-reef resources. As part of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis working group "Local-scale ecosystem resilience amid global-scale ocean change: the coral reef example," scientists gathered resultant data from four ...

This data release includes new, sub-annual Strontium/Calcium (Sr/Ca) and annual linear extension rates covering a period between 1980 and 2012 for five colonies of the massive coral, Orbicella faveolata (O. faveolata). All five coral colonies were collected live by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists from the Dry Tortugas National Park (DTNP), Florida (FL) in August 2008 and May 2012.

In July of 2016, Florida Institute of Technology researchers, in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), conducted reef-census surveys at 54 sites around Buck Island Reef National Monument, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The sites are divided across two reef sectors (North and South) and three reef habitats (fore reef, reef crest, and back reef). The surveys provided data on the percent coverage of corals and other benthic taxa, and abundance of bioeroding parrotfishes and urchins.