183-10 Spatiotemporal Forecasting of Coral Bleaching at Flower Garden Banks Using AI

Session: Recent Advances and New Voices in Marine and Coastal Geoscience (Posters)

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Abstract:

Coral reef health is declining globally due to bleaching events driven by climate change. The Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS), located in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, is one of the healthiest and northernmost coral reef systems in the Western Hemisphere, but is increasingly threatened by rising sea surface temperatures. This project aims to develop a forecasting tool to predict coral bleaching risk and support proactive reef management.

Using 40 years of environmental data, including sea surface temperature (SST), depth data, degree heating weeks (DHW), sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA), and heat stress (HS), from 17 NOAA monitoring stations across Flower Garden Banks, a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network was developed in Python. The model generates a Bleaching Area Alert (BAA) heat map and a time series analysis to visualize spatial and temporal bleaching trends. Preliminary results from June data show strong predictive performance, with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0755 and an R² of 0.7932.

This approach transforms complex environmental data into actionable insight, enabling reef managers to anticipate bleaching events rather than reacting to observed damage. By integrating temporal and depth-related variables, the model provides site-specific early warning that can guide monitoring efforts, inform marine spatial planning, and support conservation actions such as reef closures or restoration prioritization.

The methods used here have potential for scalability across other reef systems, offering a data-driven framework for predicting climate-induced coral bleaching events at multiple geographic scales. This tool thus contributes to proactive conservation efforts by turning predictive environmental modeling into practical management strategies to protect vulnerable coral ecosystems in a changing climate.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-9070

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