Water quality thresholds for coastal contaminant impacts on corals: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Abstract

Reduced water quality degrades coral reefs, resulting in compromised ecosystem function and services to coastal communities. Increasing management capacity on reefs requires prioritization of the development of data-based water-quality thresholds and tipping points. To meet this urgent need of marine resource managers, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis that quantified the effects on scleractinian corals of chemical pollutants from land-based and atmospheric sources. We compiled a global dataset addressing the effects of these pollutants on coral growth, mortality, reproduction, physiology, and behavior. The resulting quantitative review of 55 articles includes information about industrial sources, modes of action, experimentally tested concentrations, and previously identified tolerance thresholds of corals to 13 metals, 18 pesticides, 5 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), and a pharmaceutical. For data-rich contaminants, we make more robust threshold estimates by adapting models for Bayesian hierarchical meta-analysis that were originally developed for biopharmaceutical application. These models use information from multiple studies to characterize the dose-response relationships (i.e., E

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