Madin, Josh and Hoogenboom, Mia A. and Connolly, Sean and Darling, Emily and Falster, Daniel and Huang, Danwei and Keith, Sal and Mizerek, Toni and Pandolfi, John and Putnam, Holly and Baird, Andrew (2016) A trait-based approach to advance coral reef science. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 31 (6). pp. 419-428. ISSN 0169-5347
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Coral reefs are biologically diverse and ecologically complex ecosystems constructed by stony corals. Despite decades of research, basic coral population biology and community ecology questions remain. Quantifying trait variation among species can help resolve these questions, but progress has been hampered by a paucity of trait data for the many, often rare, species and by a reliance on nonquantitative approaches. Therefore, we propose filling data gaps by prioritizing traits that are easy to measure, estimating key traits for species with missing data, and identifying ‘supertraits’ that capture a large amount of variation for a range of biological and ecological processes. Such an approach can accelerate our understanding of coral ecology and our ability to protect critically threatened global ecosystems.