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Bleached pavement: the urban redevelopment of coral ecosystems
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Bleached pavement: the urban redevelopment of coral ecosystems
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Content
BLEACHED PAVEMENT: THE URBAN REDEVELOPMENT OF CORAL
ECOSYSTEMS
by
Amelia Strom Hardin
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(JOURNALISM)
August, 2009
Copyright 2009 Amelia Strom Hardin
ii
Table of Contents
Abstract iii
Article 1
Cracks in the Pavement 1
The Beginning of the End 4
A City in the Deep 7
Bleached 11
Picking up the Pieces 13
Bibliography 19
iii
Abstract
Heron Reef is a living example of a phenomenon ecologists call “Darwin’s Paradox.”
The water around the reef is crystal-clear – good news for humans who come to view the
reef, but bad news for fish and coral polyps on the hunt for food. The water is empty; it
lacks the nutrients the reef-community needs to survive. Yet somehow, the reef exists.
Here’s how: Heron is a complex network of carefully-constructed ecological niches, a
self-contained civil society amidst an ocean of brigands.
But death and destruction have come to wreak havoc on Heron Island, and the reef is
dying. The phenomenon known as coral bleaching has swept over the reef multiple times
in the past ten years, turning coral from vibrant colors to sickly white. The bleaching
events lead researchers to wonder if the 6,000-year-old reef is going to make it through
the next century, or even the next decade.
The process by which coral bleaching can lead to the degradation of a reef is
complex, and reminiscent of the decay of urban neighborhoods. Therefore, management
of reefs undergoing frequent bleaching events is similar to the management of blighted
urban neighborhoods.
And blighted neighborhoods don’t have to stay that way. In Culver City, California,
redevelopment is bringing struggling neighborhoods back from the brink. But even
though reef systems and neighborhoods are complex in similar ways, redevelopment and
careful management may not be enough to save the reef. Additional threats loom on the
horizon.
1
Cracks in the pavement
In the shallow waters that surround many of the world’s tropical shorelines, vast cities
beneath the seas have been abandoned. Their windows have gone dark.
If a film director were to cross the charming undersea community of animated fish
from Finding Nemo with the post-apocalyptic futurescape of Terminator (where the
skyscrapers of Los Angeles have been reduced to skeletons), the scene would not be too
different from what one might encounter out on coral reefs surrounding Jamaica,
Australia, and countless other islands and lengths of coastline.
The forking spires of staghorn coral on the Jamaican reefs once looked like great tree
branches, and just as trees provide homes for birds and insects, the staghorn corals played
host to teeming swarms of reef fish. For some, the corals were shelter – a set of hollows
and narrow crevices in which to retreat. For others, they were food.
The staghorn spires in all their vibrant shades of brown were living walls – the
foundation of life on the reef, its building blocks, its supply of food and energy.
But now, the towers stand empty. Bleached white, they look diminished – more like
crumbling antlers on aging trophy heads than the proud branches of the tallest trees in
this forest. Dead, abandoned tenements, the white skeletal remains of the staghorn no
longer support many fish.
This is what the degradation of the world’s coral reefs looks like.
“The structure of the reef is going to start to fall apart,” says Rich Aronson, head of
the biological sciences department at the Florida Institute of Technology. “Once the reef
becomes a flatter landscape, the fish are going to go away.”
2
The remains of some reefs are enveloped by seaweed.
One variety, known as Sargassum, is a tall green weed that creeps across the face of
the dead reef, grounding itself in the reef’s crumbling infrastructure. It grows up through
cracks in the pavement. Over time, erosion creates the stable sediments it needs to anchor
itself.
Sargassum didn’t snuff out the life that once existed beneath it. Like grass, the
seaweed is an opportunist, creeping across the reefscape as coral, fish and other denizens
die, decline or move away. Sargassum was always here competing with healthy corals
and kept in check by hungry fish.
But when the corals began to die, something turned off the lawn mowers.
That’s why when I saw grass growing uninvited in empty lots in Culver City, on the
west side of Los Angeles, I started to think about the coral reefs I had visited.
The grass growing up through pavement cracks in the empty lot at West Washington
and Centinela was ragged but short. A few pieces of trash had made it through the
collapsing chain link fence and come to rest on the lawn. The NO TRESPASSING sign
and the frayed green tarp had lightened, partially bleached in the California sun. The land
had been empty for a long time.
Like the reef, the land had degraded and become barren.
And like the patches of degraded reef, the lot wasn’t alone. Across the intersection, a
second piece of barren property had been empty for more than a year. Down the street, a
third lot – more recently vacated – had joined the Centinela lot in grassy decomposition.
Beyond that, a fourth property was recently tagged for demolition.
3
The area, said Culver City redevelopment manager John Fisanotti, whose job includes
responsibility for the vacant lots, had a history of “being a negative influence on the
community.” Motels lining the street were havens for drug traffickers. Run-down shops
along the strip were frequent targets for petty thieves.
Even before the grass and cracked pavement, the corridor had collapsed by 2008 into
a small, city-within-a-city’s mellow version of a skid road, populated by homeless men
with carts and lined with hourly motels and cheap coin laundries. And 2009 hasn’t seen
much improvement so far.
It’s Fisanotti’s job to halt that decline in the West Washington corridor. He’s
supervising the redevelopment agency’s efforts to sell the empty land to developers, with
a catch – the city gets to consider developers’ plans before the sale closes. The city plans
to ensure new buildings on West Washington can house desirable businesses, include
sufficient parking and can provide services the neighborhood lacks. This, Fisanotti said,
is the first step in a complex process the city hopes will return the faltering corridor to
thriving commercial strip.
Reef scientists also try to redevelop struggling reefs and help them recover from
decline. But just as in a city, eliminating blight out on the reef isn’t simple. That’s
because before you can work to eliminate a problem, you have to understand where it
came from.
You have to understand that reef fish can’t use seaweed to hide from predators, that
bleached coral is sick and isn’t getting enough food. You have to understand the reef’s
4
small businesses and its residents, its developers and redevelopers. You have to know the
vagrants and the drug dealers of its broken ecology.
The beginning of the end
For as long as there have been cities, people and businesses have moved away from
aging buildings and inadequate infrastructure, plunging once-prosperous neighborhoods
into cycles of ignominious decline.
The phenomenon killing coral reefs, on the other hand, is relatively new.
Known as coral bleaching, that phenomenon was first documented in the 1980s. At
first, bleaching was a rare occurrence. Since then, however, it has become increasingly
frequent, devastating reefs throughout the world’s tropics and subtropics. A consequence
of global warming, bleaching will become still more common as global temperatures rise.
And that puts all of the world’s reefs in peril.
Of course, not every reef that bleaches is destroyed. Bleaching strikes like a disease.
The corals animals lose their color and with it, their best source of food. Sometimes,
healthy reefs can recover. But others – often those also suffering from damage caused by
problems like pollution or over-fishing – can degrade past the point of recovery.
Worldwide, reefs have recovered unevenly from bleaching events. The most severe
bleaching on record so far struck in 1998, inflicting its greatest damage on the western
Indian Ocean, where up to 90 percent of the coral eventually died in some areas.
The specific number of reefs degraded past the point of recovery is debatable. But
before the 1980s, damage to such a high proportion of a reef’s coral was seen only when
hurricanes hit and scoured the surfaces of shallow reefs. By now, bleaching has affected
5
hundreds of reefs, imperiling millions of people around the world who depend on them
for food, income, and shelter from ocean waves.
In 2006, I saw a bleaching event up close. I had traveled to Australia to visit and learn
about the Great Barrier Reef along with about thirty fellow Stanford biology students.
Our destination was Heron Island and its surrounding reef, miles off the coast of eastern
Australia
I still remember my first look at Heron and its reef. The island gradually grew larger
as we approached in a small ferry. As we came nearer, water around the island seemed to
transform from blue to turquoise to mottled brown. That brown is the color of the
undersea terrain of a healthy coral reef, visible beneath meters of crystal clear water.
Like cities, platform reefs like Heron are built from the ground up by the efforts of
their denizens. Hard corals – the reef builders – secrete white skeletons of calcium
carbonate, hard stuff that’s also in seashells, limestone and cement. The uppermost coral
colonies on Heron Reef sit atop 6,000 years’ worth of the remains of their forebears.
Skeletons of these long-dead coral colonies rise from the top of a submerged hill deep
under the sea to the plane of the open ocean.
Heron Island rises far enough above the ocean to house a terrestrial ecology, but just
barely. It’s one of a string of tiny islands of similar character, known as the Capricornia
Cays. Named for their location, the islands sit where the Tropic of Capricorn crosses the
Great Barrier Reef.
Heron Reef, as the coral community around the island is called, is technically
considered a part of the Great Barrier Reef – that great, discontinuous set of reef
6
fragments that runs up the eastern coast of Australia. The segment Heron represents in
this disjointed set of dotted lines is separated from its nearest neighbor, Wisteri Reef, by
only a narrow channel. Because it is far from the mainland, Heron is moderately
protected from many of the harmful processes that have damaged reefs around the world.
Heron Reef had bleached in the 1998 event that killed so much coral in the Indian
Ocean, but it had recovered. It had also been struck by bleaching in 2002, but again
mostly recovered.
In 2006, it bleached again.
The coral reef at Heron is a diverse community, but no organisms are more important
than the coral colonies that call it home. These colonies – the great brown branches,
purple mounds of spotted brains, and rough, flat tablets that make up the shape of the
reef’s landscape – are themselves aggregations of tiny organisms called coral polyps, the
individual coral animals that live, die and reproduce on the reef. The polyps look like
small round dots on the surfaces of the colonies. Shaped like tiny sea anemones, they
float for hundreds of miles in ocean currents as larvae before settling down for a sessile
adult life building up their tiny piece of the reef.
Inside the coral polyps, tiny single-celled algae called zooxanthellae provide the
energy that powers the reef, photosynthesizing to turn solar energy into food.
When global warming heats the waters where the coral colonies dwell, the polyps,
due to a faulty immune response triggered by high temperatures, evict their
zooxanthellae. It is the first step on the road toward disaster.
7
In many cases, devastating decline isn’t far behind. That’s because the reef, like a
city, is a careful network of interrelated infrastructure and services. It is efficient. But it is
also vulnerable to escalating collapse.
A city in the deep
If scientists want to intervene on the reefs as redevelopment managers do in human
cities, they need to understand how its inhabitants fit together.
“You really need to understand how webs, how community ecology works,” says Dr.
Virginia Weis. Weis has spent much of her career studying coral polyps, but she says
when it comes to understanding problems facing reefs, individual animals aren’t what
matters.
“We’re all part of the cycle of life,” she says. “You know, everything’s connected.”
University of Queensland professor Selina Ward agrees. Ward has spent much of her
career conducting research on the reef at Heron Island. Diminutive, with sandy brown
hair and a soft Australian accent, Ward splits her time in the field between teaching and
conducting her own research. Ward has been one of the first on the scene during several
of Heron’s most recent bleaching events.
The most striking thing about the life of the reef, she says, is its astonishingly diverse
inhabitants.
Coral colonies pepper the sandy bottom with living surfaces in shades of brown. A
few species add shades of brownish-purple, brownish-green, brownish-orange, and
brownish-blue.
8
Fish swim everywhere. Butterfly fish nose the water with delicate snouts. Among
them swim larger, multicolored angel fish. Dark brown clown fish – striped with bright
orange and white – hover near pinkish anemones. Beaked parrot fish nip at the reef and
dark-colored bat fish, elongated fins sweeping behind like capes, dart by. Sometimes,
they dart away when you come close. But sometimes when you dive carefully enough,
they stay in place long enough to be caught on camera.
Some of the fish eat plankton and larvae. Others scavenge organic waste from the
surface of the reef. Grazers feed on algae. Some fish eat other fish. A few fish nip at the
coral polyps themselves.
This is the reef flat that surrounds Heron Island. Around the island from where the
reef comes closest to shore, sharks, rays and skates patrol a sandy lagoon area known as
Shark Bay. During the evening, the sharks leave the lagoon and head out to the reef crest
to feed on the fish. These reef sharks are no great white “Jaws” – they’re just a few feet
long. Black-tipped reef sharks and white-tipped reef sharks, named for the color on the
edges of their fins, chase the fish back into the shelter of protective hollows between
coral branches. Hiding in the sand on the lagoon bottom, shovel-nosed skates can be
startled awake by an errant footstep. Whiptail rays fly through the water like bats, their
long tails slinking behind them.
Heron Reef, Ward reminds me, is a living example of a phenomenon ecologists call
“Darwin’s Paradox.” The water around the reef is crystal clear – good news for the
humans who visit but bad news for sea creatures on the hunt for food. Clear means the
water is empty of the nutrients the reef community needs to survive. The great
9
multiplicity of fish, coral, turtles, sea cucumbers, giant clams and others survive without
any obvious source of nitrogen or phosphorus – critical building blocks of protein and
DNA. It’s as if someone planted a garden without using any fertilizer – or even any soil.
The paradox is the reason the community survives. The reef’s existence in nutrient-
poor water relies on its ability to reuse nutrients efficiently. Reef fish provide a “wall of
mouths” that prevents resources like food or minerals from escaping out to sea. And
bottom dwellers like sea cucumbers scavenge wastes from the sediments before those
wastes and their nutrients, too, can escape out into the deep. Heron Reef is a complex
network of carefully-constructed ecological niches aimed at retaining resources, where
the activities of each species often benefit the reef as a whole.
The reef is a self-contained civil society.
“It’s a nice, tight, sort of recycling,” Aronson explains. “That’s how corals manage to
be so productive in some nutrient-poor environments.”
“Nothing is wasted,” Ward says. “Every bit of nitrogen and phosphorus is grabbed by
something… It’s all being grabbed and used again. It’s the fish defecating and urinating
on the corals, which then take up the nutrients again. I think you can look at cities in that
sort of way as well. There’s always someone out there to take advantage of every sort of
thing that happens.”
But the price of relying upon an efficient set of interdependencies for survival is that
reef ecosystems are vulnerable to collapse. Break a connection here and there, and the
whole web falls apart. It’s the same in cities.
10
In healthy cities, at least, someone is always around to fill a need for a business or to
rent a vacant apartment. But when critical services or infrastructure go, gaps begin to
appear in a system that ought to look seamless. Before long, buildings crumble, and
businesses close their doors.
In human cities, these critical services include electricity, water, the availability of
food, and transportation, among others.
On the reef, the most critical service is the conversion of sunlight into energy, a task
done by the single-celled zooxanthellae that live inside the corals, source of the brown
tint that colors them.
The symbiosis between zooxanthellae and coral polyps that allows the brown cells to
live inside the separate coral animals is one of the most important partnerships on the
reef. The polyps build the hard, white skeletons that make up the reef infrastructure. They
build the structure and ingest nutrients when they can, while the single-celled creatures
they host provide most of the food they need.
“They’re in a symbiosis between these little animals and these little algae that are
living inside of them. And that symbiosis is central to understanding corals and corals are
central to coral reefs, and that symbiosis is really the very structure the whole reef sits
on,” Weis says. “And coral bleaching is a collapse of that symbiosis.”
Bleaching is rolling blackouts and famine. It signals the collapse of the energy source
that powers and feeds the reef.
11
And just as a city neighborhood with crumbling infrastructure tends to lose its
inhabitants when its key services shut down, the reef’s tenants begin to clear out. Its
businesses close their doors.
And grass begins to grow up through cracks in the empty pavement.
Bleached
The fundamental cause of bleaching – and the reef degradation it initiates – is global
warming. When intense sunlight combines with seawater temperatures above a critical
temperature, coral polyps evict their zooxanthellae tenants. The tiny algae are expelled,
weakened or killed outright.
The most striking outcome of this zooxanthellae expulsion is the changing color of
the corals. This transition from rich brown to white is what gives bleaching its name.
“Before a bleaching event, you generally have a lot of color on the reef,” Ward says.
“Or a lot of brownness. Even the bright colors have that brownness in the background,
and all is well.
“Once the bleaching event starts, you’ll see the corals start to lose color,” she says.
“In the middle of a big bleaching event, you actually get this amazing, glowing white.
And the glowing white is interspersed with colonies that have really bright, fluorescent
colors.”
Zooxanthellae are brown the way leaves are green. But just as leaves can turn red,
yellow or orange before they fall, when the zooxanthellae go, coral polyps can turn blue,
or green, or purple.
Bleaching, Ward says, can be beautiful in a stark sort of way.
12
For a long time, the reason for the expulsion of the zooxanthellae was unclear. But
recent evidence has tuned up an insidious reason for the collapse of the coral-
zooxanthellae symbiosis.
It’s the coral polyps’ immune systems.
In normal conditions, polyps recognize their zooxanthellae as authorized visitors
inside their tissues. The algal cells don’t emit anything the polyps recognize as foreign,
and they are left alone. But when the heat reaches a critical temperature – a temperature
that depends on both the species of polyp and the species of zooxanthellae – the little
algae become stressed, and emit a changed chemical signature. Suddenly recognizing the
zooxanthellae as foreign organisms, the coral animals respond with a massive immune
response.
“It’s like a host waking up and saying, oh my god, I’ve got this foreign thing in me
and I have to get it out, I have to attack it,” Weis said.
Aronson calls coral bleaching a “noninfectious disease.” A change in the environment
– not a pathogen – triggers the immune response. But like autoimmune diseases, it leaves
the reef vulnerable to secondary infections, including coral diseases caused by bacteria or
viruses. It also leaves behind altered relationships up and down the food web.
“It’s sort of like getting HIV and then having your immune system sort of break
down,” Weis says. “When corals bleach they stop growing quickly, they become
susceptible to a variety of diseases that previously we had never seen.”
13
The corals become sick. When the bleaching lasts long enough or happens frequently
enough, they can’t recover. The reef goes from bright, glowing white to a crumbling,
duller shade, covered in seaweed.
That’s when the reefs slide down the slippery slope toward disaster.
Picking up the pieces
Our understanding of why human neighborhoods fall into decline isn’t clear cut.
Urban ecologists can use disease and life cycles as analogies, but when it comes down to
it, people don’t act exactly like cells under attack from a virus or like animals
metamorphosing as they make their way through a life cycle, explains Linda Ishem, an
urban studies professor at the University of Washington.
Similarly, coral reefs aren’t exactly like cities, and renovating them after they fall into
disrepair isn’t exactly the same process as bringing a neighborhood back from the brink.
But Ishem acknowledges it makes sense to use the analogy, to a point. Reefs and
cities are complex in many of the same ways. And in many of the same ways, that very
complexity can lead to their collapse.
“The reason ecological theories remain so widespread is they have significant
explanatory power related to the growth and development of urban neighborhoods,” she
says.
The same argument can work in the other direction.
When I describe coral reefs to redevelopment manager Fisanotti, he acknowledges
there are parallels between what he does and what scientists working to save reefs are
trying to do.
14
In West Washington, Fisanotti says the city is intervening and removing blight. Their
intervention should cause the crime rate to fall, which will allow small businesses to
return to the urban corridor.
The city’s intervention catalyzes the neighborhood’s re-growth. The cycle of
degradation is halted.
On the reef, seaweed and marauders like sea stars or sea urchins are a few of the
vagrants who need to be removed in order for regrowth to be possible.
One of the reasons seaweed can overtake a reef is that bleaching decreases the
populations of herbivorous fish like parrotfish that eat seaweeds like Sargassum. At some
point, without mouths biting them back, the seaweeds start to win the contest for quality
reef real estate.
Ensuring a healthy population of herbivores can keep bleaching from becoming total
degradation, at least on reefs where seaweed is a problem. The seaweed doesn’t cause the
problem – but healthy herbivores can mean the difference between sickness and death for
the reef. As a result, managers in places like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park are
working to limit recreational fishing on the reef, ensuring healthy fish populations.
But as Aronson is quick to point out, over-fishing isn’t what’s killing the reef.
Restoring services like herbivory isn’t going to prevent it from bleaching in the first
place.
The only way to do that is to halt global warming.
15
“The fundamental problem with bleaching is that most coral bleaching is due to
climate change,” Ward says. “So the best way that we can prevent bleaching events is to
reduce emissions.”
But although a worldwide reduction in carbon dioxide emissions would help avert
global warming, it’s a long-term, difficult solution. So, Ward says, intervening on a local
level is also necessary.
“The best we can do on the ground,” she says, “is to try to keep the reefs we can in
the best condition we possibly can, so they’re stronger during bleaching events.”
One such local solution is to try draping covers over reefs, creating shade during the
warmest parts of the day. Another is cooling the water during the warmest part of the
year by mixing it with colder, deeper seawater.
Applying these local solutions is no small endeavor. In the United States alone – a
country not especially known for its coral reefs – the areas that would need active
management span 13 time zones. There are reefs off Florida, off the coast in the Gulf of
Mexico, and off Hawaii. Others are off the shores of far-flung island territories.
But even if redevelopment-like strategies can be used to bring reefs back from
degradation, and even if shades and cool water can be used to prevent reefs from
bleaching, another problem looms that could still mean the demise of the reefs.
Seawater in the world’s oceans is becoming increasingly acidic.
As it turns out, the same excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that triggers global
warming is also mixing with the ocean, dissolving gradually over time. It’s a slow
16
process that can’t be stopped. And as it mixes, it brings down the average pH of the
water, changing its chemistry.
And that change will have a profound impact on corals.
The extra carbon dioxide could spell disaster for the reefs, says Joan Kleypas of the
Institute for the Study of Science and the Environment at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research. Kleypas is an expert on ocean acidification.
Reef-building coral polyps construct their hard, white skeletons of a material called
calcium carbonate. In order to create the material, corals need carbonate – a form of
inorganic carbon that is much more common when seawater conditions aren’t acidic. As
the carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean, carbonate ions become increasingly difficult
to come by, and it becomes increasingly difficult for corals to build their skeletons, the
structural foundation of the reef.
“At the organism level,” Kleypas says, “we call it osteoporosis.”
As coral polyps struggle to build new bones, reefs will begin to erode away. And
reefs like Heron, built atop calcium carbonate produced by corals over thousands of
years, will disappear.
The only long-term solution to ocean acidification and coral bleaching is to decrease
the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“But even if we act fast and do everything we can on this,” says Mark Eakin, of the
U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s going to take time before
we can turn that big ship around.”
17
Eakin says scientists and managers expect the carbon dioxide already in the
atmosphere will lead to at least one additional degree Celsius of average global warming
on top of what reefs are already facing. That’s if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions
now.
What he hopes will save the reefs, ultimately, is the development of technology that
can scrub the atmosphere and ocean of extraneous carbon dioxide. But until that happens,
he agrees that reef managers need to act to increase the resilience of the reefs.
Resilience is the ability of the reef system to bounce back from disaster – even one as
disruptive as bleaching.
In Culver City, Fisanotti says, the redevelopment agency has already succeeded in
pulling several neighborhoods back from disaster.
In fact, he says, in East Washington – a corridor across the city from West
Washington – a redevelopment program has succeeded in renovating old buildings and
homes. The city has revamped public streets and utilities.
And critically, he says, when the redevelopment agency pulled out, locals continued
the renewal process.
Successful redevelopment, Fisanotti says, means managers put themselves out of
business.
So we can save eroding city blocks like those in Culver City from permanent descent
into blight. However, it remains to be seen if we are able to redevelop the reefs, which are
also troubled by pollution, nutrients from the shore and overfishing in addition to
18
bleaching and acidification – all problems that will have to be faced by managers hoping
to save them.
And it is clear that a human hand will be needed to manage the reefs as they face the
next few decades of global warming. Without us, it could take nature and evolution
thousands of years to take these blighted, degraded neighborhoods beneath the sea and
begin again.
19
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Heron Reef is a living example of a phenomenon ecologists call “Darwin’s Paradox.” The water around the reef is crystal-clear – good news for humans who come to view the reef, but bad news for fish and coral polyps on the hunt for food. The water is empty
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Paleoecology of Upper Triassic reef ecosystems and their demise at the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, a potential ocean acidification event
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Hardin, Amelia Strom
(author)
Core Title
Bleached pavement: the urban redevelopment of coral ecosystems
School
Annenberg School for Communication
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Journalism (Print Journalism)
Publication Date
08/10/2009
Defense Date
06/28/2009
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Tag
coral bleaching,coral reef,Heron Island,OAI-PMH Harvest,ocean acidification,urban redevelopment
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Culver City
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islands: Heron Island
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Language
English
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Cole, K. C. (
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), Kotler, Jonathan (
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), Parish, Amy (
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)
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lia.s.hardin@gmail.com,liahardin@gmail.com
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2385
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etd-Hardin-3147 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-250902 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2385 (legacy record id)
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Hardin, Amelia Strom
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Los Angeles, California
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Tags
coral bleaching
coral reef
Heron Island
ocean acidification
urban redevelopment