Coral reefs are, per unit area, the most productive and diverse ecosystems on the planet. Their complexity and, in some places, fragility provide many complications to scientists conducting high quality research in these environments. Scientific diving has been, for the past six decades, a highly cost-effective and productive tool in coral reef research. Using high impact outputs and based main...

Coral reefs increasingly are undergoing transitions from coral to macroalgal dominance. Although the functional roles of reef herbivores in controlling algae are becoming better understood, identifying possible tipping points in the herbivory-macroalgae relationships has remained a challenge. Assessment of where any coral reef ecosystem lies in relation to the coral-to-macroalgae tipping point ...

Coral reefs around the world are largely in decline (Bellwood et al. 2004; Bruno & Selig 2007; De’ath et al. 2012), putting the roughly 7.5% of humanity that depends on them in jeopardy. Diagnoses of the extent of reef decline and debate about the causes, which collectively define the global coral reef crisis, are based largely on local-scale estimates of shallow-water reef condition measured a...

High biodiversity ecosystems are commonly associated with complex habitats. Coral reefs are highly diverse ecosystems, but are under increasing pressure from numerous stressors, many of which reduce live coral cover and habitat complexity with concomitant effects on other organisms such as reef fishes. While previous studies have highlighted the importance of habitat complexity in structuring r...

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The health and functioning of coral reef ecosystems worldwide is in decline, and in the face of increasing anthropogenic stress, the rate of decline of these important ecosystems is set to accelerate. Mitigation strategies at regional scales are costly, but nevertheless critical, as reef systems are highly connected across regions by ocean transport of both larval propagules and pollutants. It ...

Crustose coralline algae (CCA) are key producers of carbonate sediment on reefs today. Despite their importance in modern reef ecosystems, the long-term relationship of CCA with reef development has not been quantitatively assessed in the fossil record. This study includes data from 128 Cenozoic coral reefs collected from the Paleobiology Database, the Paleoreefs Database, as well as the origin...

Climate change has recently been implicated in poleward shifts of many tropical species including corals; thus attention focused on higher-latitude coral communities is warranted to investigate possible range expansions and ecosystem shifts due to global warming. As the northern extension of the Florida Reef Tract (FRT), the third-largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world, southeast Florida (...

Recurrent disturbances can have a critical effect on the structure and function of coral reef communities. In this study, long-term changes were examined in the hard coral community at Wanlitung, in southern Taiwan, between 1985 and 2010. In this 26 year interval, the reef has experienced repeated disturbances that include six typhoons and two coral-bleaching events. The frequency of disturbanc...

Climate change has emerged as a principal threat to coral reefs, and is expected to exacerbate coral reef degradation caused by more localised stressors. Management of local stressors is widely advocated to bolster coral reef resilience, but the extent to which management of local stressors might affect future trajectories of reef state remains unclear. This is in part because of limited unders...