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...

Sponges are efficient filter feeders, removing significant portions of particulate and dissolved organic matter (POM, DOM) from the water column. While the assimilation and respiration of POM and DOM by sponges and their abundant microbial symbiont communities have received much attention, there is virtually no information on the impact of sponge holobiont metabolism on the composition of DOM a...

BACKGROUND Cold-water coral reef ecosystems are recognized as biodiversity hotspots in the deep sea, but insights into their associated bacterial communities are still limited. Deciphering principle patterns of bacterial community variation over multiple spatial scales may however prove critical for a better understanding of factors contributing to cold-water coral reef stability and functionin...

Understanding the resilience of vulnerable sectors of social-ecological systems is critical in an era of escalating global change. The coral reef tourism sector is highly vulnerable not only to ecological effects of climate change and other anthropogenic disturbances on reefs, but also to shocks such as economic recession and energy price escalation. Commercial tourism enterprises are key playe...

Coral reef fisheries support the livelihoods of millions of people but have been severely and negatively affected by anthropogenic activities. We conducted a systematic review of published data on the biomass of coral reef fishes to explore how the condition of reef fisheries is related to the density of local human populations, proximity of the reef to markets, and key environmental variables ...

The ecosystem goods and services provided by coral reefs are critical to the social and economic welfare of hundreds of millions of people, overwhelmingly in developing countries [1]. Widespread reef degradation is severely eroding these goods and services, but the socioeconomic factors shaping the ways that societies use coral reefs are poorly understood [2]. We examine relationships between h...

Coral reef lagoons are generally regarded as zones of net heterotrophy reliant on organic detritus generated in more productive parts of the reef system, such as the seaward reef flat. The abundance and biomass of sediment infauna were measured seasonally for one year (1986) within the lagoon of Davies Reef, central Great Barrier Reef, to test the hypothesis that macrofaunal biomass and product...

This paper constitutes the first qualitative study of coral reef fish populations in the archipelago of the Glorieuses Islands (northern Mozambique Channel). Sampling by visual census techniques, at depths between 0 and 15 meters, was carried out at 30 stations spread over the whole reef. Three hundred and thirty-two (332) fish species belonging to 57 families were registered in this way. These...

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...

In this demo proposal, we describe REEF, a framework that makes it easy to implement scalable, fault-tolerant runtime environments for a range of computational models. We will demonstrate diverse workloads, including extract-transform-load MapReduce jobs, iterative machine learning algorithms, and ad-hoc declarative query processing. At its core, REEF builds atop YARN (Apache Hadoop 2’s resourc...