ABSTRACT: Coral reefs prefer to reside in warm, clean, clear waters with high oxygen content. Any deterioration of their environment would affect the life of coral reefs. Therefore, coral reefs serve as an important indicator of the environmental condition. Kenting National Park enjoys the most abundant coral reefs around Taiwan. However, recent extreme weather events, such as Typhoon Morakot i...

BACKGROUND A number of factors have recently caused mass coral mortality events in all of the world's tropical oceans. However, little is known about the timing, rate or spatial variability of the loss of reef-building corals, especially in the Indo-Pacific, which contains 75% of the world's coral reefs. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPLE FINDINGS We compiled and analyzed a coral cover database of 6001 qu...

Coral reefs are under increasing pressure from anthropogenic and climate-induced stressors. The ability of reefs to reassemble and regenerate after disturbances (i.e., resilience) is largely dependent on the capacity of herbivores to prevent macroalgal expansion, and the replenishment of coral populations through larval recruitment. Currently there is a paucity of this information for higher la...

Herbivory is a key process on coral reefs that can facilitate reef-building corals by excluding algae that otherwise negatively impact coral settlement, growth, and survivorship. Over the last several de cades, coral cover on Caribbean reefs has declined precipitously. On many reefs, large structurally complex corals have been replaced by algae and other non-reef-building organisms, resulting i...

The bleaching in 1997 and 1998 left the largest damage to the coral reefs in Okinawa Islands, Japan. Among these coral reefs, some corals were recovered to 2000 and others were completely damaged and no further recovery is expected. The environmental changes, forced those damages, are still under discussion among the increase of water temperature, increase of sediments or turbidity, and other a...

Ocean temperatures are increasing globally and the Caribbean is no exception. An extreme ocean warming event in 2010 placed Tobago's coral reefs under severe stress resulting in widespread coral bleaching and threatening the livelihoods that rely on them. The bleaching response of four reef building taxa was monitored over a six month period across three major reefs systems in Tobago. By identi...

Coral bleaching, triggered by elevated sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) has caused a decline in coral cover and changes in the abundances of corals on reefs worldwide. Coral decline can be exacerbated by the effects of local stressors like turbidity, yet some reefs with a natural history of turbidity can support healthy and resilient coral communities. However, little is known about responses of...

Networks of no-take marine reserves (NTMRs) are widely advocated for preserving exploited fish stocks and for conserving biodiversity. We used underwater visual surveys of coral reef fish and benthic communities to quantify the short- to medium-term (5 to 30 years) ecological effects of the establishment of NTMRs within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP). The density, mean length, and b...

2 Biodiversity is an important factor in all healthy ecosystems. Coral reef ecosystems support an incredibly diverse community of fish species. As coral reefs are in decline due to a combination of factors such as climate change and over fishing, the species which are being supported by the reef are at risk. In particular, coral reef fish communities have been shown to be in decline. Coral reef...

The reduction in coral cover on many contemporary tropical reefs suggests a different set of coral community assemblages will dominate future reefs. To evaluate the capacity of reef corals to persist over various time scales, we examined coral community dynamics in contemporary, fossil, and simulated future coral reef ecosystems. Based on studies between 1987 and 2012 at two locations in the Ca...