Are you attending the ASLO 2027 Aquatic Sciences Meeting? Do you want to share your work ocean acidification in the Caribbean and Latin America with a broader audience? Consider submitting your abstract by the September 15 deadline to the session below and contact the organizers below directly with any questions about the session.
The meeting will take place February 28 – March 5, 2027 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You must register for the meeting and pay the abstract submission fee prior to submitting. After registering, you’ll receive a link to the submission site. Be sure to review the Session List to ensure your abstract is in the right session. There are limited student and early career travel grants, as well as caregiver grants, available for ASLO members.
SS15 Ocean Acidification in the Caribbean and Latin America: Monitoring High-Risk Areas
Organizers
Jose Martinez, Caribbean Coastal Acidification Network
Debbie-Ann Gordon-Smith, Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON) Caribbean Hub
Cecilia Chapa-Balcorta, Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON) Latin American and Caribbean Network (LAOCA)
Jessie Turner, OA Alliance
Session Description
The Caribbean and Latin America are home to diverse landscapes and vital marine ecosystems that form the bedrock of the region’s economy, supporting over 700 million people. Unfortunately, decades of urbanization, continuous monoculture, and global climate change threaten to destabilize these ecosystems. One of these destabilizing forces is ocean acidification (OA), caused by excess atmospheric CO2 entering ocean basins resulting in shifting ocean chemistry in the direction of lower pH. This stresses marine organisms, especially calcifiers like corals, making it harder to grow and maintain their shells and skeletons, risking key economic sectors like fisheries and tourism. While OA is a global phenomenon, there is significant variation in regional severity and impact, especially in coastal zones where local stressors, marine organisms, and hydrodynamics play a strong role in regulating carbonate chemistry.
This session will bring together presentations that highlight ocean and coastal acidification work in the Caribbean and Latin America, with particular emphasis on monitoring in high-risk areas. We define “high-risk” as locations where OA intersects with other stressors such as nutrient runoff, warming, deoxygenation and activities like coral restoration and shellfish aquaculture. Along the Latin American Pacific, upwelling of low-pH water creates chronic stress similar to recurrent Sargassum inundation events on Caribbean coasts, both of which can acutely exacerbate global OA. This emphasizes the importance of OA regional studies, as they create a scientific baseline to inform locally appropriate OA mitigation and adaptation strategies.
However, long-term monitoring and research in the Caribbean and Latin America have lagged behind those of other stressors. For example, only 34% of ocean professionals engaged in OA monitoring in the Caribbean measure two of the four OA parameters required to characterize a carbonate chemistry system (Grabb et al. 2025). A lack of low-cost sensors and/or complex laboratory methods that require specific training and expensive instruments likely drives this gap, meaning that the very studies we need are not occurring at the pace OA demands of us. All of this results in a disparity in how governments and coastal communities respond to OA’s local and regional impacts. Fortunately, many across the region have recognized this and moved beyond isolated efforts to establish regional networks driven by international frameworks dedicated to overcoming challenges like limited resources and technical capacity. These networks include the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network (GOA-ON), that has a Latin American (LAOCA) and Caribbean Hub, IAEA Ocean Acidification International Coordination Centre (OA-ICC), the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (CARICOOS), and the Caribbean Coastal Acidification Network (Cari-CAN).
These networks have achieved success, including LAOCA’s recent session for young scientists on understanding the impacts of OA, CARICOOS’s MapCO2 buoy (which has been gathering OA data since 2009), and the OA-ICC’s recent training course on monitoring OA in Jamaica. We must further leverage these networks to foment the creation of low-cost OA monitoring methods and strengthen the technical capacity of the region’s researchers. This would bridge the gap that governments and coastal communities need to manage, adapt, and mitigate the impacts of OA.
