Species Richness and Abundance of Reef-Building Corals in the Indo-West Pacific: The Local–Regional Relation Revisited
Lyndon DeVantier, Emre Turak, Robert Szava‐Kovats
Abstract
The degree to which biotic communities are regionally enriched or locally saturated, and roles of key structuring processes, remain enduring ecological questions. Prior studies of reef-building corals of the Indo-west Pacific (IWP) found consistent evidence of regional enrichment, a finding subsequently questioned on methodological grounds. Here we revisit this relation, and associated relations between richness and abundance (as ‘Effective Number of Species’), and coral cover, used as a proxy for disturbance and competition. From 1994 to 2017, we sampled > 2,900 sites on shallow (typically 200 species, > 40 percent of regional pools and > 25 percent of the IWP total. For deep and shallow sites combined, the highest local tally reached 280 species ha-1. These places may represent the asymptote of local richness in reef-building corals, rare examples of the ecological complexity for which these increasingly endangered communities are justly renowned.