Université de Fribourg

Forecasted coral reef decline in marine biodiversity hotspots under climate change

Descombes, Patrice ; Wisz, Mary S. ; Leprieur, Fabien ; Parravicini, Valerianio ; Heine, Christian ; Olsen, Steffen M. ; Swingedouw, Didier ; Kulbicki, Michel ; Mouillot, David ; Pellissier, Loïc

In: Global Change Biology, 2015, vol. 21, no. 7, p. 2479–2487

Coral bleaching events threaten coral reef habitats globally and cause severe declines of local biodiversity and productivity. Related to high sea surface temperatures (SST), bleaching events are expected to increase as a consequence of future global warming. However, response to climate change is still uncertain as future low-latitude climatic conditions have no present-day analogue. Sea surface...

Université de Fribourg

Quaternary coral reef refugia preserved fish diversity

Pellissier, Loïc ; Leprieur, Fabien ; Parravicini, Valeriano ; Cowman, Peter F. ; Kulbicki, Michel ; Litsios, Glenn ; Olsen, Steffen M. ; Wisz, Mary S. ; Bellwood, David R. ; Mouillot, David

In: Science, 2014, vol. 344, no. 6187, p. 1016–1019

The most prominent pattern in global marine biogeography is the biodiversity peak in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. Yet the processes that underpin this pattern are still actively debated. By reconstructing global marine paleoenvironments over the past 3 million years on the basis of sediment cores, we assessed the extent to which Quaternary climate fluctuations can explain global variation in...