Tracking Reef Resilience Through Museum Collections: Presence-Absence Analysis of Floridian Coral Traits Over Time

Museums worldwide have organized collections of hundreds of corals, yet most studies of coral museum records in the United States focus on DNA for symbiosis and taxonomic investigations. Few researchers have explored processing these collections for insights into ecological resilience, particularly for marine species in and near the Caribbean. This study utilizes two large coral reef databases from natural history museums to track the presence and absence of Floridian coral reef genera and their traits from 1887 to 2024 in response to acute and chronic disturbances. The aim is to identify coral genera and their characteristic traits to better understand the influence of sea surface temperature anomalies and hurricane exposure. These findings are then compared to available in-situ studies to assess whether coral museum records can reliably inform future modeling and enhance understanding of species retention or loss on regional and paleoecological scales. This research serves as a case study for applying similar approaches to other regions in the Caribbean and global reef locations.