Responses and Records of Coral Reefs to Climatal and Environmental Change

Reef corals are well-known as excellent archives for recording the environmental history of the tropical oceans because they are very sensitive to environmental changes (such as SST, sea level, El Niño, seawater pH, flooding, storms, industrial and agricultural pollution) and can accurately record environmental variations in their aragonite skeletons. Long-term monitoring suggests that the coral reefs all over the world have suffered a dramatic decline over the past half century. Human activities or global climate change have been considered as the dominant factors responsible for the decline of coral reefs, which can be recorded by the proxies in coral skeletons. Thus, we can reconstruct the history of past environmental changes for centuries in coral reefs, and then explore the response of corals to human activities or global climate change on a long time series.

For this Topical Collection, we seek to compile a broad range of manuscripts that both detail the records of corals and their responses to environmental changes. This information can benefit the exploration of the key factors controlling the development and degeneration of coral reefs in different areas of the world.

Keywords: coral reefs; climate change; anthropogenic activity; Holocene; marine environment; paleooceanography; ecological evolvement; biocompatibility