The longest delay: Re-emergence of coral reef ecosystems after the Late Devonian extinctions

Supporting Coral Reef Ecosystems Research through Modelling Re-usable Ontologies

The Semantic Reef project is an eco-informatics application that endeavours to combine multiple environmental datasets to test ecological hypotheses and derive information about environmental systems. The intention is to develop an automated data processing, problem-solving and knowledge discovery system to better understand and manage coral reef ecosystems. Remote environmental monitoring (inc...

Evolution and Function of Coral Reef Ecosystems

Experimental biology of coral reef ecosystems

Coral reef ecosystems are at the crossroads. While significant gaps still exist in our understanding of how ‘‘normal’’ reefs work, unprecedented changes in coral reef systems have forced the research community to change its focus from basic research to understand how one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world works to basic research with strong applied implications to alleviate damage, sav...

Resetting predator baselines in coral reef ecosystems

What did coral reef ecosystems look like before human impacts became pervasive? Early efforts to reconstruct baselines resulted in the controversial suggestion that pristine coral reefs have inverted trophic pyramids, with disproportionally large top predator biomass. The validity of the coral reef inverted trophic pyramid has been questioned, but until now, was not resolved empirically. We use...

The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of Puerto Rico

INTRODUCTION AND SETTING The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is comprised of a number of islands in the northern Caribbean, including the island of Puerto Rico and offshore islands such as Culebra, Vieques, Monito, and Desecheo (Figure 3.1). The following information adds to the comprehensive overview of Puertorrican reefs provided in the previous edition of this report (García-Sais et al., 2005). ...