“Atoll islands with native vegetation and thriving seabird populations are 'naturally active systems that can change and adapt to their environmental conditions if they are allowed to do so,' said Nick Graham, a marine ecologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, who led an international team of scientists that studied island resilience across 28 atoll islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Their paper, published Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that restoring atoll ecosystems reinforces their growth. Seabirds ferry nutrients from the open ocean and deposit them on the atolls as guano that nurtures land plants, marine life and coral growth. This provides more material for reef building, as parrotfish and other reef feeders turn dead coral into sand to maintain beaches, while native plants with extensive root networks stabilize sediments.

The new study measures the 'reef accretion potential' for the islands, showing it to be twice as high on lagoonal and ocean-facing reefs around rat-free islands with abundant seabirds as around rat-infested islands. That would be 'sufficient to closely keep up with predicted sea-level rises to the end of the century under a 2 degree Celsius warming scenario,' said co-author Casey Benkwitt, a California-based restoration scientist with The Nature Conservancy.”

From Inside Climate News.