About the Authors

Coral Reefs & Global Climate Change: Potential Contributions of Climate Change to Stresses on Coral Reef Ecosystems

Author Bios

Robert W. Buddemeier, Kansas Geological Survey

Robert Buddemeier specializes in examining how environmental factors control coral reef development at the global scale.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (Seattle) in Inorganic and Radiochemistry, where his dissertation research involved radiocarbon studies of the recent history of the marine carbon cycle.  Dr. Buddemeier subsequently held faculty appointments at the University of Hawaii in the Departments of Chemistry and Oceanography, and in the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics.  There he initiated his research program into the biogeochemical, geochronologic, and hydrologic aspects of coral reef systems.  Next, he moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where his interests expanded to include terrestrial environmental monitoring, continental hydrology, and climate change.  His most recent appointment in the Kansas Geological Survey (with courtesy professorial rank in the Department of Geography, University of Kansas) has engaged him in more applied water resource and policy work, while he continues his interests and activities in marine and coastal subjects as well as the larger issue of climate change. From 1996 - 2002, he served on the steering committee of the Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP).  He currently focuses on integrating and making more accessible the large amounts of data and information needed to understand the interactions of human society with natural systems and resources in a rapidly changing environment.

Joan A. Kleypas, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Joan Kleypas specializes in examining how environmental factors control coral reef development at the global scale.  She has a bachelor’s degree in Marine Biology from Lamar University, Texas, and a master’s in Marine Ecology from University of South Carolina.  She obtained a Ph.D. from James Cook University, where, as a Fulbright scholar to Australia, she conducted a reef-coring program to examine the causes of differences in coral reef development in the southern Great Barrier Reef. From there she moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado to examine not only how climate affects coral reefs, but also how coral reefs affect climate.  Much of this work entailed modeling reef responses to sea level and temperature changes since the last ice age.  She is currently involved with issues relating to the direct effects of increasing atmospheric CO2 on coral reefs, specifically how CO2-induced changes in seawater chemistry affect the rates at which reef-building coral and algae secrete their calcium carbonate skeletons.  Dr. Kleypas is currently a scientist in the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group at NCAR.

Richard B. Aronson, Dauphin Island Sea Lab

Richard B. Aronson received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1979 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1985. For his dissertation research, he had a Fulbright scholarship to study the ecology of a saltwater lake in the Bahamas. His research next took him to the British Isles, and he dove extensively in the cold waters off the west coast of Scotland as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow in 1985-86. Next, he moved on to the Smithsonian Institution, and after teaching for a year at The George Washington University he moved to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama in 1994.  Dr. Aronson is currently a Senior Marine Scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and a Professor of Marine Sciences at the University of South Alabama. His research program combines ecology and paleontology, with the goal of understanding how global climate change, emerging diseases, and changing patterns of land use affect the animals and plants living on coral reefs and how those reefs function. Among his research projects are reef-coring studies in Belize and Panama, a long-term study of the impact of sea urchins on coral growth in Jamaica, and work on the effectiveness of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Florida Keys and the Flower Garden Banks off the Texas coast.