scholarly journals The transformation of Caribbean coral communities since humans

Author(s):  
Katie Cramer ◽  
Mary Donovan ◽  
Jeremy Jackson ◽  
Benjamin Greenstein ◽  
Chelsea Korpanty ◽  
...  

The mass die-off of Caribbean corals has transformed many of this region’s reefs to macroalgal-dominated habitats since systematic monitoring began in the 1970s. Although attributed to a combination of local and global human stressors, the lack of long-term data on Caribbean reef coral communities has prevented a clear understanding of the causes and consequences of coral declines. We integrated paleoecological, historical, and modern survey data to track the prevalence of major coral species and life history groups throughout the Caribbean from the pre-human period to present. The regional loss of Acropora corals beginning by the 1960s from local human disturbances resulted in increases in the prevalence of formerly subdominant stress-tolerant and weedy scleractinian corals and the competitive hydrozoan Millepora beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. These transformations have resulted in the homogenization of coral communities within individual countries. However, increases in stress-tolerant and weedy corals have slowed or reversed since the 1980s and 1990s in tandem with intensified coral bleaching. These patterns reveal the long history of increasingly stressful environmental conditions on Caribbean reefs that began with widespread local human disturbances and have recently culminated in the combined effects of local and global change.

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Melina Pappademos

I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Smith

This paper examines how the past of desert landscapes has been interpreted since European explorers and scientists first encountered them. It charts the research that created the conceptual space within which archaeologists and Quaternarists now work. Studies from the 1840s–1960s created the notion of a ‘Great Australian Arid Period'. The 1960s studies of Lake Mungo and the Willandra Lakes by Jim Bowler revealed the cyclical nature of palaeolakes, that changed with climate changes in the Pleistocene, and the complexity of desert pasts. SLEADS and other researchers in the 1980s used thermoluminescence techniques that showed further complexities in desert lands beyond the Willandra particularly through new studies in the Strzelecki and Simpson Dunefields, Lake Eyre, Lake Woods and Lake Gregory. Australian deserts are varied and have very different histories. Far from ‘timeless lands', they have carried detailed information about long-term climate changes on continental scales.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip ◽  
F. González-Barrios ◽  
Esmeralda Pérez-Cervantes ◽  
Ana Molina-Hernandez ◽  
Nuria Estrada-Saldívar

Abstract Diseases are major drivers of the deterioration of coral reefs, linked to major declines in coral abundance, reef functionality, and reef-related ecosystems services1-3. An outbreak of a new disease is currently rampaging through the populations of the remaining reef-building corals across the Caribbean region. The outbreak was first reported in Florida in 2014 and reached the northern Mesoamerican reef by summer 2018, where it spread across the ~ 450-km reef system only in a few months4. Rapid infection was generalized across all sites and mortality rates ranged from 94% to < 10% among the 21 afflicted coral species. This single event further modified the coral communities across the region by increasing the relative dominance of weedy corals and reducing reef functionality, both in terms of functional diversity and calcium carbonate production. This emergent disease is likely to become the most lethal disturbance ever recorded in the Caribbean, and it will likely result in the onset of a new functional regime where key reef-building and complex branching acroporids (a genus apparently unaffected) will once again become conspicuous structural features in reef systems with yet even lower levels of physical functionality.


2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 546-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Pandolfi

I investigated the degree to which the interpretation of reef coral distribution data is influenced by the numerical and taxonomic scale of analysis in Pleistocene coral communities from the Caribbean Sea. Patterns of community differentiation analyzed at both species and genus levels showed only small differences using different numerical scales (relative abundance, rank abundance and species presence and absence). Whereas some differences were observed between species and genus level patterns, they had little effect on paleoecological interpretations. The greatest differences occurred when presence and absence analyses of assemblages sampled along 40-m transects were compared with those sampled along 40-m transects augmented by a one-hour search for rare taxa. These results suggest that paleoecological interpretations of Quaternary coral communities are robust to numerical scale of analysis at the species and genus level, and to taxonomic scale between the species and genus level. However, interpretations of community structure are sensitive to sampling intensity, geographic scale, and sample size.


F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Altaf Mangera ◽  
Nadir Osman ◽  
Christopher R. Chapple

Lichen sclerosus affecting the male genitalia is a poorly understood but potentially devastating condition. The natural history of the condition is beginning to be understood better with longer follow-up of patients. Recent long-term data suggest that circumcision for lichen sclerosus limited to the prepuce may not be curative as was once thought. In addition, surgical treatments should be followed up for longer periods as recurrences may occur after urethroplasty and perineal urethrostomy.


Author(s):  
Alexander Cowan

Urban centers had an influence on the development of Renaissance Europe disproportionate to their overall demographic importance. Most of the population continued to live and work in the countryside, but towns and cities functioned as key centers of production, consumption and exchange, political control, ecclesiastical organization, and cultural influence. Historians still debate the relative roles of urban and rural areas in facilitating the development of capitalism in the long term. Writing on urban history has a very long pedigree dating back to the 16th century, but as an academic discipline it began to flourish in the late 19th century. Since the 1960s, the range of approaches to the field has widened considerably from concerns with political and economic organization to take in issues of governance, social structure, and, most recently, overlapping urban cultures. The role of religious belief, particularly in the context of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, runs as a thread throughout the history of the urban experience.


ARTMargins ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-118
Author(s):  
Terry Smith

Change in the history of art has many causes, but one often overlooked by art historical institutions is the complex, unequal set of relationships that subsist between art centers and peripheries. These take many forms, from powerful penetration of peripheral art by the subjects, styles and modes of the relevant center, through accommodation to this penetration to various degrees and kinds of resistance to it. Mapping these relationships should be a major task for art historians, especially those committed to tracing the reception of works of art and the dissemination of ideas about art. This lecture, delivered by Nicos Hadjinicolaou in 1982, outlines a “political art geography” approach to these challenges, and demonstrates it by exploring four settings: the commissioning of paintings commemorating key battles during the Greek War of Independence; the changes in Diego Rivera's style on his return to Mexico from Paris in the 1920s; the impact on certain Mexican artists in the 1960s of “hard edge” painting from the United States; and the differences between Socialist Realism in Moscow and in the Soviet Republics of Asia during the mid-twentieth century. The lecture is here translated into English for the first time and is introduced by Terry Smith, who relates it to its author's long-term art historical quest, as previously pursued in his book Art History and Class Struggle (1973).


2008 ◽  
Vol 79 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 239-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ad de Bruijne ◽  
Aart Schalkwijk

Analyses ethnic residential patterns, in terms of spatial segregation, in Paramaribo, as these developed historically, and their correlation to the changing socioeconomic position of the various ethnic groups. Authors first point out how Paramaribo is at present one of the most multiethnic and multicultural cities of the Caribbean, and discuss the continuing importance of ethnic identity and boundaries. They further describe the history of Paramaribo's development since the period of slavery and after abolition, when many Creoles migrated to the city. Hindustani started migrating in higher numbers to Paramaribo since the early 20th c., mainly to the urban periphery, and since the 1960s also more Javanese. More recently (since the 1980s) migrants to Paramaribo include Maroons, Amerindians, Chinese, and Brazilians. Authors examine in how far the residential patterns were determined by socioeconomic factors, and/or by ethnicity. They conclude that socioeconomic factors have overall become more influential in residential patterns than ethnicity. They point out that residential ethnic mixing has increased, as almost half of Paramaribo's neighbourhoods are mixed, with no dominant ethnic group, although some ethnic concentration continues, as a quarter of the neighbourhoods can be called Creole, one-fifth of them Hindustani, and Creoles (and Maroons) reside for a higher percentage in the city centre, and Hindustani and Javanese more in the urban periphery.


2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JÉRÔME DESTOMBES

This article is a West African case-study of the nutritional history of everyday poverty. It draws on unusually rich statistical evidence collected in northeastern Ghana. In the 1930s, pioneer colonial surveys revealed that seasonal poor diet was pervasive, by contrast with undernourishment. They pave the way for constructing a new set of anthropometric data in Nangodi, a savanna polity where John Hunter completed a classic study of seasonal hunger in the 1960s. A re-survey of the same sections and lineages c. 2000, during a full agricultural cycle, shows a significant improvement in nutritional statuses, notably for women.


Corpus Mundi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-36
Author(s):  
Julie Patarin-Jossec

If the literature in the history of the Soviet space program is extremely prolific since the 1960s, including regarding cosmonaut embodiment, a lack remains regarding the contemporary reality of human spaceflight in Russia. As this article discusses, based on interviews and a long-term ethnography of the Russian training of astronauts from Western Europe, North America, and Japan, becoming an astronaut is to develop a legitimate body fitting dominant cultural and gendered models. Three mechanisms serve the manufacture of “heroes” and masculine bodies through the astronaut training: the historical narrative of human spaceflight; the values and virility attributes embed as part of the training; and the instruments used in the daily activity of astronauts (such as spacesuits). This manufacture of a legitimate body, characterized by masculinity and discipline inherited from the past, is a heuristic field for corporality and studies of global politics as it underlines how an interweaving of gender, Soviet heritage, and cultural fantasies frames the bodies of a professional elite.


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