Interactive results
Climate change effects on Atlantic reef builders.

In terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems several species provide structural complexity to the environment 1. By creating three dimensional space these species provides shelter, increases niche availability and can provide resources for other organisms 2 3. In coral reefs, Scleractinian corals plays a key role as habitat forming species 4. Reduction in its abundance can potentially lead to the loss of diversity in the ecosystem 5. Thus, understanding the possible changes in the distribution of reef builders is an important task to understand how climate change may affect coral reefs and also to propose conservation actions to ensures coral reefs persistence in the future.

Here, we provide an interactive version of the results section of our work “Predicted shifts in the distribution of Atlantic reef building corals in face of climate change”, published in Frontiers in Marine Sciences (Open Access), where we projected the current and future distribution (in three RCP scenarios) of three key reef builder corals of the Atlantic. This work was authored by Silas C. Principe, André L. Acosta, João Espíndola and Tito Lotufo and is part of a major project designed to understand the impacts of climate change on key species of shallow reefs of the Atlantic.

In the Summary section we provide details on the methods used to produce this work. On the Results menu you will find links to the maps produced for the current and future periods. An important note: due to specifications of the leaflet package (used to produce the interactive maps), some differences may be evident as the original images are in a different projection from the ones here (EPSG:3857).

All the original codes and data are available on the GitHub link provided. Please, feel free to e-mail us if you have any question: .

The authors want to thanks Dr. Carlos Perez, Dr. Paulo Sumida and Dr. Miguel Mies for valuable comments on a first draft of the article. We also thanks all members of the Reef Biology Lab for the support.


  1. e.g. Graham, N. A. J., and Nash, K. L. (2013). The importance of structural complexity in coral reef ecosystems. Coral Reefs 32, 315–326. doi:10.1007/s00338-012-0984-y.↩︎

  2. Jones, C. G., Lawron, J. H., and Shachak, M. (1997). Positive and negative effects of organisms as physical ecosystem engineers. Ecology 78, 1946–1957. doi:10.1890/0012-9658(1997)078[1946:PANEOO]2.0.CO;2.↩︎

  3. Jones, C. G., Lawton, J. H., Shachak, M., and Organisms, M. (1994). Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers. Oikos 69, 373–386.↩︎

  4. e.g. Alvarez-Filip, L., Gill, J. A., and Dulvy, N. K. (2011b). Complex reef architecture supports more small-bodied fishes and longer food chains on Caribbean reefs. Ecosphere 2, art118. doi:10.1890/es11-00185.1.↩︎

  5. Richardson, L. E., Graham, N. A. J., and Hoey, A. S. (2020). Coral species composition drives key ecosystem function on coral reefs. Proc. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 287, 20192214. doi:10.1098/rspb.2019.2214.↩︎

Silas C. Principe, 2020. Proudly created using R Markdown.