The Unprecedented Loss of Florida's Reef‐Building Corals and the Emergence of a Novel Coral‐Reef Assemblage

We analyzed the species composition of Holocene reefs throughout the Florida Keys and compared the millennial‐scale trends in reef composition to modern reef assemblages. We show that whereas the composition of Florida's reefs was remarkably stable for the last 8,000 years, there have been unprecedented changes in species composition in recent decades. The geological reef structure of the Florida Keys was constructed by just a handful of reef‐building species, predominantly Acropora palmata and Orbicella spp. Those species have been replaced throughout the western Atlantic by more ephemeral, weedy coral taxa. In this novel ecosystem state, reef growth will be limited. Photo credit: Lauren Toth. Photo credit: Lauren Toth. The photograph was collected during fieldwork under permit DRTO‐2018‐SCI‐0005 from the National Park Service. Photo credit: Lauren Toth. The photograph was collected during fieldwork under permit DRTO‐2018‐SCI‐0005 from the National Park Service. These photographs illustrate the article “The unprecedented loss of Florida's reef‐building corals and the emergence of a novel coral‐reef assemblage” by Toth, L.T., A. Stathakopoulos, I.B. Kuffner, R.R. Ruzicka, M.A. Colella, E. A. Shinn published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.278