Development of Standard Operating Procedures for repeated measures of process and state variables of coral reef environments

Most reef studies and monitoring programs examine the state variables (i.e. coral cover, macroalgal cover, size-frequency distributions) of coral reefs, by assessing the coverage of major benthic organisms; few studies examine the key ecological processes that drive these state variables. Processes of major interest include recruitment rates, individual growth rates, partial mortality rates of clonal organisms, and survival. We are also interested in macro-processes such as predation, herbivory, and oceanography and their influence. Understanding these key processes, assessing their spatial variation and their relationship with state variables will lead to predictive models of population trajectories, relative population size distributions, and community change under different climate change scenarios. Yet, key processes that drive community composition differ in accordance with region setting, and possibly among localities within regions. Furthermore, the key processes that drive community structure and population dynamics may also vary in their influence depending on the spatial scale of observation. Read more