Assessing the sensitivity of coral connectivity modelling to mesh resolution in the Great Barrier Reef (or "How fine is fine enough?")
(2018) Fourth International Marine Connectivity (iMarCo) — Location: Heraklion, Crete, Greece (8.October.2018)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
Saint-Amand, Antoine 
- Abstract
- Over the past decade, constant efforts have been put in modelling the connectivity between the 3000+ individual reefs composing the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). However, the computing cost of such models compared to the vastness of the GBR often leads to use coarse resolution models. In this study, we use the 2D unstructured-mesh coastal ocean SLIM model to assess the impact of mesh resolution on model results. SLIM uses unstructured meshes that offer the flexibility to vary the spatial resolution so that computational resources can be allocated where they are most useful: the level of detail is set at a high precision near reefs, islands and along the coast, but is coarser in open seas. More particularly, this work is an attempt to assess the effect of the highest level of detail of the mesh on the resulting connectivity estimates. For this purpose, we built five different meshes for which the highest resolution ranges from 250m to 4km. For each setup, we model the ocean currents to simulate larval dispersal. We then compare the effect of mesh resolution on different connectivity indicators (number of reefs resolved, average connectivity length, community structure, ...). Our results suggest that a 500m resolution is at least required to have solid estimates of coral connectivity.
- Affiliations
Citations
Saint-Amand, A., Lambrechts, J., & Hanert, E. (2018). Assessing the sensitivity of coral connectivity modelling to mesh resolution in the Great Barrier Reef (or “How fine is fine enough?”). Fourth International Marine Connectivity (iMarCo), Heraklion, Crete, Greece. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/233347