A coral reefs carbonate budget strongly influences reef structural complexity and net reef growth potential, and thus is increasingly recognized as a key “health” metric. Despite this, understanding of habitat specific budget states, how these scale across reef platforms, and our ability to quantify both framework and sediment production values remains limited. Here, we use in-situ census data ...

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...

AIM Coral reef communities occurring in deeper waters have received little research effort compared to their shallow-water counterparts, and even such basic information as their location and extent are currently unknown throughout most of the world. Using the Great Barrier Reef as a case study, habitat suitability modelling is used to predict the distribution of deep-water coral reef communitie...

Nearshore coral communities within turbid settings are typically perceived to have limited reef-building capacity. However, several recent studies have reported reef growth over millennial time scales within such environments and have hypothesized that depth-variable community assemblages may act as equally important controls on reef growth as they do in clear-water settings. Here, we explicitl...

The importance of seagrass beds and mangroves as juvenile habitats for coral reef fishes is still debatable. We hypothesised that the configuration of these habitats in the marine landscape in relation to the coral reef would influence accessibility from the reef (both for fishes that use these habitats for shelter or feeding, and their predators). In combination with differences in habitat com...

Ningaloo Reef extends some 280 km along the western coast of Australia, and consists of a barrier reef ~1-6 km offshore with occasional gaps, backed by a shallow lagoon. The reef morphology thus has some similarities to submerged breakwaters, which largely attenuate wave energy by wave breaking over the reef flat. This wave breaking generates radiation stress gradients that produce setup and wa...

Oyster reefs and seagrass beds are being lost worldwide at alarming rates. These habitats provide many services to humankind and, thus,much effort has been dedicated to their restoration. Here, we examine the efficacy of created oyster reefs at enhancing seagrass beds through the amelioration of hydrographic conditions and water quality. We carried out a field experiment in the Northern Gulf of...

Reef restoration activities have proliferated in response to the need to mitigate coral declines and recover lost reef structure, function, and ecosystem services. Here, we describe the recent shift from costly and complex engineering solutions to recover degraded reef structure to more economical and efficient ecological approaches that focus on recovering the living components of reef communi...

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can either protect all seabed habitats within them or discrete features. If discrete features within the MPA are to be protected humans have to know where the boundaries are. In Lyme Bay, SW England a MPA excluded towed demersal fishing gear from 206 km(2) to protect rocky reef habitats and the associated species. The site comprised a mosaic of sedimentary and reef...

In the granitic Seychelles, many shores and beaches are fringed by coral reef flats which provide protection to shores from erosion by waves. The surfaces of these reef flats support a complex ecology. About 10 years ago their seaward zones were extensively covered by a rich coral growth, which reached approximately to mean low water level, but in 1998 this was largely killed by seawater warmin...