Document of bibliographic reference 312076

BibliographicReference record

Type

Bibliographic resource

Type of document

Journal article

BibLvlCode

AS

Title

Resolving the depth zonation paradox in reef‐building corals

Abstract

Changes in abundance across a natural environmental gradient provide important insights into a species’ realized ecological niche. In reef‐building corals, a species’ niche is often defined using its depth range. However, most reef‐building coral species occur over a broad depth range, a fact that is incompatible with the strong zonation found in coral assemblages across depth. We resolve this paradox by modelling the abundance distributions of 110 coral species across a 45m depth gradient to show that most are in fact depth specialists and reveal that depth range alone is incapable of capturing a species’ depth use. We then highlight the significance of our results by demonstrating how depth range greatly overestimates the potential number of species with a refuge at depth from global warming. Our findings illustrate both the limitations of the simple metric of depth range, and the ecological insights that can be gained by moving beyond it.

WebOfScience code

https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000478103000014

Bibliographic citation

Roberts, T.E.; Bridge, T.C.L.; Caley, M.J.; Madin, J.S.; Baird, A.H. (2019). Resolving the depth zonation paradox in reef‐building corals. Ecology 100(8): e02761. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2761

Topic

Marine

Is peer reviewed

true