Abstract

Caribbean corals continue to experience extensive decline due to increased pressures related to climate change, disease, pollution, predation, and other anthropogenic stressors. To understand the impact of reef loss on the relative extinction risk of individual coral species, all 52 known Caribbean endemic corals have been reassessed for extinction risk under the Categories and Criteria of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. This is the first comprehensive review of the changing status of corals within the region since the previous Red List assessments in 2008. Estimates of individual species declines were calculated based on modeled live coral cover loss across several Caribbean subregions over the past 30 years (1989-2019) coupled with relative species’ vulnerabilities and indicators of population resilience based on species traits. Although these recently completed Red List assessments use a different dataset to estimate decline than the original assessments conducted in 2008, the proportion of threatened coral species in the Caribbean has increased from approximately 25% to nearly 50%. If these data were available to the 2008 assessment process, our results indicate that Caribbean corals would have qualified for higher extinction risk categories. Based on this, we infer that, though remaining dangerously high, the rate of Caribbean coral decline has slowed in recent decades. However, coral cover loss alone is insufficient to determine individual species decline, there remains a need for more species-specific information and the incorporation of modeled data on the onset of annual severe bleaching events.

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