Climate Change on the Great Barrier Reef During the January-March 2011 Warm Period Revealed by the Coral Sea Steel Association (CAS)

The number of plant species decreases but the number of traits increases as environments get more dry.

The Great Barrier Reef isn’t included in the UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites this year, at least according to the researchers.

The latest Nature study focuses on annual temperatures from January through March, when ocean temperatures at the reef are at their peak. This year, according to the new coral-skeleton record, the Coral Sea’s surface temperature during this period reached an average of 1.73 °C above the 1618–1899 average. Henley and his colleagues modelled Earth’s climate both with and without historical greenhouse-gas emissions and determined that the ocean warming trend in their record would not have been possible without human activity.

But researchers caution that the impacts of this year’s mass bleaching event aren’t completely captured in the report and that scientists might not get a full picture of the coral mortality for another 6–9 months. Around 30–50% of the reefs surveyed from the air are still at risk, says Neal Cantin, a coral biologist at AIMS, who helped to lead the surveys.

The Nature Podcast – Discovering the diversity of plant traits at a certain dry aridity with a game of publish or perish

Don’t miss an episode. You can subscribe to Nature’s radio on Apple,Spotify, and the like. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast

 is available too.

A new board game called “Publish or Perish” can be played out for laughs and is similar to the idea that publications are the basis of a scientist’s career. The game was developed to help researchers bond over shared trauma, it features many disasters familiar to academics and players must compete to get the most citations on their publications. Reporter Max Kozlov set out to avoid perishing and published his way to a story about the game for the Nature Podcast.

Plants show a greater diversity of qualities in dry environments. It is a measure of the performance of an organisms in an environment, and can include some things such as the size of a plant or its photosynthetic rate. Although there are good data on this kind of diversity in temperate regions, an assessment of drylands has been lacking. The new study fills this knowledge gap and finds that, counter to a prevailing expectation that fewer traits would be displayed, at a certain level of aridity, trait diversity doubles. The team behind the work hope that it can help us better protect biodiversity as the planet warms and areas become drier.