Dr. Charles Birkeland, Ph.D.

:: Dr. Charles Birkeland, Ph.D. - Science - 2007

The science career of Charles Birkeland has always been underwater where he combined his ecological field experiments with natural history observations. His PhD thesis, begun in 1965, determined how sea pen populations were able to persist despite the intense combined predation pressure of seven species of predators. Also in the 1960s he discovered the life history dynamics of the invertebrates on Cobb Seamount, 400 miles off the coast of Washington state. The most abundant gastropod and starfish populations at a depth of 110 ft, the top of the seamount, were brooding species (so how could they get to the seamount so far from the coast?), and the gastropod was only found otherwise in the intertidal. Also in the 1960s, he spent a continuous three weeks underwater on Tektite II, determining the predatory behavior of molluscs on sea fans. Birkeland has been doing research on coral reef ecology and management since 1970 when he was a post-doc at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He was a professor at the University of Guam Marine

Laboratory from 1975 to 2000 and has been at the University of Hawaii since 2000. He has done much of his field work in American Samoa since 1979. The main focus of his research has been the factors that determine reef resilience or capacity for reef systems to recover. He has also been especially involved in determining how life history characteristics of species affect their role in the system, e.g., why the crown-of-thorns starfish has such an impact, and how the older individuals in populations of fishes can have disproportionate effects on the ecosystem and on the resilience of their own populations.

While in Panama he did the first experimental underwater field studies of coral recruitment and demonstrated the importance of nutrient input to the survival of coral recruits. These studies on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Panama led to an understanding of how nutrient input affected ecological processes on coral reefs on a large scale in different geographic regions of the world.

Birkeland also determined that nutrient input into the coral-reef ecosystem leads to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks through fertilization of phytoplankton blooms that feed the starfish larvae. He coauthored a book on "Acanthaster planci: major management problem of coral reefs" and edited a textbook on "Life and death of coral reefs". He was the third president of the International Society for Reef Studies, organized the seventh International Coral Reef Symposium, and was recently presented an award for "Outstanding Scientific Advancement of Knowledge" by the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force and was elected Honorary Fellow of the Pacific Science Association.

Birkeland's present work involves the energy drain of chronic predation pressures on Hawaiian corals, the influence of past history on the effectiveness of MPAs, the influence of an introduced grouper on the fish communities of Hawaii, and how the corals in a lagoon with extreme temperature fluctuations have acclimatized or possibly adapted to the stressful conditions of global climate change.