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Ocean warming is increasing the incidence, scale, and severity of global-scale coral bleaching and mortality, culminating in the third global coral bleaching event that occurred during record marine heatwaves of 2014-2017. While local effects of these events have been widely reported, the global implications remain unknown. Analysis of 15,066 reef surveys during 2014-2017 revealed that 80% of surveyed reefs experienced significant coral bleaching and 35% experienced significant coral mortality. The global extent of significant coral bleaching and mortality was assessed by extrapolating results from reef surveys using comprehensive remote-sensing data of regional heat stress. This model predicted that 51% of the world’s coral reefs suffered significant bleaching and 15% significant mortality, surpassing damage from any prior global bleaching event. These observations demonstrate that global warming’s widespread damage to coral reefs is accelerating and underscores the threat anthropogenic climate change poses for the irreversible transformation of these essential ecosystems.

Food security is described as a condition in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (World Food Summit, 1996). Climate variability and climate change can affect all aspects of food security, but past impact assessments have focused primarily on agricultural production. Efficient responses require an understanding of the full spectrum of potential climate impacts on food utilization, access and availability, as well as on the underlying natural, built and governance systems. In this paper, we apply a broader systems approach to evaluating food systems resilience in the context of climate change (Bizikova, Tyler, Moench, Keller, & Echeverria, 2015) to 10 communities in Honduras. The results indicate that resilience building depends on a sound understanding of how communities access food and how climate impacts can cascade through different parts of the food syste...

Increasing heat stress due to global climate change is causing coral reef decline, and the Caribbean has been one of the most vulnerable regions. Here, we assessed three decades (1985–2017) of heat stress exposure in the wider Caribbean at ecoregional and local scales using remote sensing. We found a high spatial and temporal variability of heat stress, emphasizing an observed increase in heat exposure over time in most ecoregions, especially from 2003 identified as a temporal change point in heat stress. A spatiotemporal analysis classified the Caribbean into eight heat-stress regions offering a new regionalization scheme based on historical heat exposure patterns. The temporal analysis confirmed the years 1998, 2005, 2010–2011, 2015 and 2017 as severe and widespread Caribbean heat-stress events and recognized a change point in 2002–2004, after which heat exposure has been frequent in most subsequent years. Major heat-stress events may be associated with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), but we highlight the relevance of the long-term increase in heat exposure in most ecoregions and in all ENSO phases. This work produced a new baseline and regionalization of heat stress in the basin that will enhance conservation and planning efforts underway.

This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsible for extensive patterns of deforestation in Central America. This pattern is most pronounced in the region's large protected areas. We wanted to know how cocaine trafficking affects conservation governance in Central America's protected areas, and whether deforestation is a result of impacts on governance. To answer this question, we interviewed conservation stakeholders from key institutions at various levels in three drug-trafficking hotspots: Peten, Guatemala, Northeastern Honduras, and the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. We found that, in order to establish and maintain drug transit operations, drug-trafficking organizations compete with and undermine conservation governance actors and institutions. Drug trafficking impacts conservation governance in three ways: 1) it undermines long standing conservation coalitions; 2) it fuels booms in extractive activities inside protected lands; and 3) it erodes the territorial control that conservation institutions exert, exploiting strict “fortress” conservation governance models. Participatory governance models that provide locals with strong expectations of land tenure and/or institutional support for local decision-making may offer resistance to the impacts on governance institutions that we documented.

This manuscript provides new insights on an unusual morphological plasticity growth form on Acropora spp. in the Caribbean. This abnormal knob-shaped growth is thought to be a progression from the damselfish “chimneys” that are commonly seen in coral-algal farms. However, the diameters of the observed knobs tend to be much larger on Acropora palmata, where they range from 1.37 to 5.44 cm in diameter, and they tend to be slightly smaller on A. prolifera, where they range from 1.1 to 2.72 cm in diameter. These knob-like chimney growths can affect entire colonies. The knobs are mostly covered with live tissue, while some knobs compete with turf algae. We hypothesize that these growths may be linked to stress from multiple predation and environmental conditions. Local stressors could synergistically influence the regeneration of scarred tissue and skeleton that result from predatory lesions, possibly leading to the formation of the knobs. Therefore, we provide preliminary data from a shallow reef site in coastal Honduras located within the Mesoamerican region where we found the knobs. To the best of our knowledge, the conditions that drive the occurrence of these unusual “knob-like chimneys” on Acropora spp. have not been previously assessed. Thus, we propose a series of guidelines to research the coral morphological plasticity that may be linked to this knob-like chimney phenomenon.