USGS St. Petersburg Science Seminar Series
The SPCMSC hosts a monthly seminar featuring scientists from both U.S. Geological Survey and non-USGS scientists. The seminars are usually hosted the third Tuesday of each month at 12 pm ET / 9 am PT on Microsoft Teams and are open to the public. Check out our schedule below for upcoming events.
Explore upcoming seminars:
Microsoft Teams links will be added on this page as they become available.
April 15, 2025, 1-2 pm EST
Lauren Toth
Research Physical Scientist, USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center
"The past, present, and future of coral reef growth in the Florida Keys." The in-person seminar will be in Conference Room B. Click here to join the meeting.
Coral reefs create essential habitat that supports biodiversity, fisheries, tourism, and shoreline protection. The persistence of reefs habitats, and the critical ecological and socioeconomic functions they support, relies on the balance between the processes of reef growth (or “accretion”) and erosion. Over the last half century, however, environmental perturbations have driven widespread declines in reef-building coral populations, disrupting that balance and threatening the persistence of essential coral-reef habitats. Reviving the reef-accretion process is among most fundamental challenges in coral-reef science and an understanding of how future environmental perturbations will influence that process is critical to designing effective coral-reef management strategies. It is challenging, however, to accurately quantify and forecast the long-term process of reef accretion based on short-term ecological studies alone. Geological records, particularly those from relatively sensitive, marginal reef environments such as the subtropical reef system of south Florida, can provide essential context for understanding the modern decline of coral reefs, projecting how the long-term processes of reef accretion and erosion will change in the future, and optimizing strategies for coral-reef management. Using a combination of millennial-scale reconstructions of reef accretion and paleoecology from reef cores and contemporary carbonate-budget modeling, the research program I have led at the USGS-SPCMSC over the last decade has focused on developing a more comprehensive understanding of the past, present, and potential future of coral-reef development in south Florida. This presentation will highlight the unique history of Florida’s marginal reefs compared with more typical, tropical locations, and demonstrate how their sensitivity to environmental change could serve as a bellwether for predicting the future of reefs globally. I will also describe how my research merges inferences across timescales to work towards the goal of providing geological information that can be directly applied to improve the efficacy of coral-reef management and restoration.
View information on past seminars.