BayesReef: A Bayesian inference framework for modelling reef growth in response to environmental change and biological dynamics
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Estimating the impact of environmental processes on vertical reef development in geological timescales due to complex models and data with missing information is a very challenging task. This paper provides a Bayesian framework called BayesReef, based on PyReef-Core, for the estimation and uncertainty quantification of environmental processes and factors which impact the depth distribution of communities of corals and coralline algae (coralgal assemblages) found in fossil reef drill cores. PyReef-Core is a deterministic, carbonate stratigraphic forward model designed to simulate the key biological and physical processes that determine vertical accretion and assemblage changes in reef drill cores. The results show that explicitly accounting for the temporal structure of the reef core, as opposed to only the depth structure, increases accuracy in parameter estimation. BayesReef provides insights into the complex posterior distributions of parameters in PyReef-Core and provides the groundwork for future research in this area.
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