Massive declines in population abundances of marine animals have been documented over century-long time scales. However, analogous loss of spatial extent of habitat-forming organisms is less well known because georeferenced data are rare over long time scales, particularly in subtidal, tropical marine regions. We use high-resolution historical nautical charts to quantify changes to benthic stru...

John M. Pandolfi* and Jeremy B.C. Jackson Centre for Marine Studies and Department of Earth Sciences, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld 4072, Australia Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA; and Center for Tropical Paleoecology an...

Systematic conservation planning increasingly underpins the conservation and management of marine and coastal ecosystems worldwide. Amongst other benefits, conservation planning provides transparency in decision-making, efficiency in the use of limited resources, the ability to minimise conflict between diverse objectives, and to guide strategic expansion of local actions to maximise their cumu...

A total of 1951 species of freshwater and marine fishes belonging to 704 genera and 186 families are recorded in Malaysia. Almost half (48%) are currently threatened to some degree, while nearly one third (27%) mostly from the marine and coral habitats require urgent scientific studies to evaluate their status. Freshwater habitats encompass the highest percentage of threatened fish species (87%...

In many marine ecosystems, biodiversity critically depends on foundation species such as corals and seagrasses that engage in mutualistic interactions [1-3]. Concerns grow that environmental disruption of marine mutualisms exacerbates ecosystem degradation, with breakdown of the obligate coral mutualism ("coral bleaching") being an iconic example [2, 4, 5]. However, as these mutualisms are most...

The ocean’s biological diversity—its genetic resources, species, and ecosystems—provides immense benefits to the United States and to all of human society. Knowledge about these resources is still rudimentary; however, trends in the best studied species and ecosystems— commercially exploited fishes, protected marine mammals and turtles, and certain coastal ecosystems, such as coral reefs— indic...

Systematic conservation planning increasingly underpins the conservation and management of marine and coastal ecosystems worldwide. Amongst other benefits, conservation planning provides transparency in decision-making, efficiency in the use of limited resources, the ability to minimise conflict between diverse objectives, and to guide strategic expansion of local actions to maximise their cumu...

While the role of host preference in ecological speciation has been investigated extensively in terrestrial systems, very little is known in marine environments. Host preference combined with mate choice on the preferred host can lead to population subdivision and adaptation leading to host shifts. We use a phylogenetic approach based on two mitochondrial genetic markers to disentangle the taxo...

Coral reefs have been used by humans as recreation areas and as a source of food and other products for thousands of years. The e€ects of humans on coral reefs are not well understood, especially on a regional or global scale. A special survey protocol called ``Reef Check'' was designed to be used by volunteer recreational divers, trained and led by marine scientists, and based on the use of hi...

The author is with the Marine Biology Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA 92093-0202, USA and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Republic of Panama. E-m ail: [email protected] Rainforests of the sea. Biodiversity in the Indo-Pacific region was measured by counting the total numbers of species in the 13 most spe...