Understanding pressure pathways and their cumulative impacts is critical for developing effective environmental policy. For coral reefs, wide spread bleaching resulting from global warming is occurring concurrently with local pressures, such as increases in suspended sediments through coastal development. Here we examine the relative importance of suspended sediment pressure pathways for dredging impacts on corals and evidence for synergistic or antagonistic cumulative effects between suspended sediments and thermal stress. We show that low to moderate reductions in available light associated with dredging may lead to weak antagonistic (less than expected independently) cumulative effects. However, when sediment loads are high any reductions in mortality associated with reduced bleaching are outweighed by increased mortality associated with severe low light periods and high levels of sediment deposition and impacts become synergistic (greater than what would occur independently). The findings suggest efforts to assess global cumulative impacts need to consider how pressures interact to impact ecosystems, and that the cumulative outcome may vary across the range of realised pressure fields.
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