Ocean Ecosystems

The Archival Computed Tomography Scanning Project (ACTS) currently develops the USGS Coral Core Archive, housed at the Pacific and St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Centers, that contains approximately 500 coral reef cores from U.S. jurisdictions worldwide. This archive, is one of the largest coral archives in the world and provides historical context for coral-reef science studies...

Diadema antillarum scuticociliatosis (DaSc) is an emerging infectious disease affecting sea urchins of the genus Diadema . Caused by a ciliate most closely related to Philaster apodigitiformis , the infection caused mass mortalities of urchins in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas in 2022-2023.

A USGS multi-disciplinary team will use laboratory and modeling approaches to investigate the cause of stony coral tissue loss disease.

USGS scientists are collaborating with multiple agencies to provide the esssential foundation for understanding these deep-sea environments.

The microbial community on coral reefs is generally underappreciated given the ubiquity, abundance, complexity, and formative role these prokaryotes serve in the metabolic and chemical processes on reefs. We use microbiological and metagenomic techniques to decipher the roles the microbial community are playing in processes such as coral disease, submarine groundwater discharge, calcification, and...

The coral microbial ecology group has an active research program identifying and characterizing the microbial associates of both tropical and cold-water (deep-sea) corals and their surrounding habitat. Current projects focus on coral disease dynamics, bacterial diversity, and using metagenomics to elucidate the functional roles of coral microbes.

This project uses amplicon sequencing, and functional microarrays to examine the microbiomes of several deep-sea coral species, with priority given to species that are also of interest to the population genetics group: Desmophyllum dianthus, Lophelia pertusa , Enallopsammia sp., and Acanthogorgia sp. The project also uses metagenomics to survey benthic habitats including coral mounds, cold seeps...

The specific objectives of this project are to identify and describe the processes that are important in determining rates of coral-reef construction. How quickly the skeletons of calcifying organisms accumulate to form massive barrier-reef structure is determined by processes of both construction (how fast organisms grow and reproduce) and destruction (how fast reefs break down by mechanical...

Photos of corals affected by black-band disease in the Florida Keys.

This effort focused on understanding the patterns and scalability of roughness and topographic complexity of marine habitats, such as coral reefs.

ATRIS is a benthic-survey tool that simultaneously acquires geo-located, color, digital images with corresponding water depths.

This project focused on developing algorithms for quantifying benthic habitat complexity from images, modeling the structural complexity of the seafloor, and using fluorescence signatures to classify coral reef habitats.