Identifying multiple coral reef regimes and their drivers across the Hawaiian archipelago

Loss of coral reef resilience can lead to dramatic changes in benthic structure, often called regime shifts, which significantly alter ecosystem processes and functioning. In the face of global change and increasing direct human impacts, there is an urgent need to anticipate and prevent undesirable regime shifts and, conversely, to reverse shifts in already degraded reef systems. Such challenges require a better understanding of the human and natural drivers that support or undermine different reef regimes. The Hawaiian archipelago extends across a wide gradient of natural and anthropogenic conditions and provides us a unique opportunity to investigate the relationships between multiple reef regimes, their dynamics and potential drivers. We applied a combination of exploratory ordination methods and inferential statistics to one of the most comprehensive coral reef datasets available in order to detect, visualize and define potential multiple ecosystem regimes. This study demonstrates t...

珊瑚礁恢复力（coral reef resilience）的丧失可导致底栖结构（benthic structure）发生显著变化，这类变化通常被称为生态系统状态转换（regime shifts），会显著改变生态系统的过程与功能。面对全球变化与日益加剧的人类直接活动影响，我们亟需预判并规避不良的生态系统状态转换，同时扭转已退化珊瑚礁系统中的此类转换过程。应对此类挑战，需要更深入地理解支撑或破坏不同珊瑚礁生态系统格局的人为与自然驱动因子。夏威夷群岛横跨自然与人为影响的广泛梯度区间，为我们探究多重珊瑚礁生态系统状态转换、其动态变化与潜在驱动因子之间的关联提供了独特契机。本研究针对现有最全面的珊瑚礁数据集之一，结合探索性排序方法与推断性统计手段，以识别、可视化并界定潜在的多重生态系统状态转换类型。本研究证明了（原文此处未完成）