Regulation of population size of arborescent octocorals on shallow Caribbean reefs
Regulation of population size of arborescent octocorals on shallow Caribbean reefs
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DOI：
10.3354/meps12907
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发表时间：
2019-04-18
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Lasker, Howard R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Edmunds, Peter J.;Lasker, Howard R.
珊瑚礁危机的定义是石珊瑚覆盖范围的减少，但在加勒比珊瑚礁上，它也与八珊瑚数量的增加有关。这些增加的人口原因尚不清楚，但海洋八珊瑚“森林”和陆地树木森林之间的相似之处（例如提供栖息地的三维框架的形成）表明，可以通过比较这两种类型的森林来深入了解因果关系。这项研究描述了美属维尔京群岛圣约翰的八珊瑚群落，并评估了它们与反映陆地森林结构的两个过程的拟合优度的动态：自我间伐和密度依赖的补充。 2014年至2017年，我们对6个珊瑚礁（7-9 m深）的八珊瑚（>5 cm高）进行了普查，从而揭示了其密度和高度的年份差异。在5个地点，这种变化与自我疏伐不一致，但在第6个地点，出现了密度下降和高度增加的趋势，这些影响很大程度上归因于Eunicea spp.；这种模式与多种过程一致，其中之一是自稀化。对于新兵（
The coral reef crisis is defined by declining cover of scleractinians, but on Caribbean reefs it also is associated with increasing abundances of octocorals. The demographic causes of these increases are not understood, but parallels between marine 'forests' of octocorals, and terrestrial forests of trees (e.g. formation of a 3-dimensional framework providing habitat), suggests that insights into causation might be found by comparing the 2 types of forest. This study describes communities of octocorals in St. John, US Virgin Islands, and evaluates their dynamics for goodness of fit to a construct reflecting 2 processes structuring terrestrial forests: self-thinning and density-dependent recruitment. Octocorals (>5 cm tall) were censused on 6 reefs (7-9 m depth) from 2014-2017, thus revealing differences among years in their density and height. At 5 sites, this variation was inconsistent with self - thinning, but at the 6th, there was a trend for densities to decline and height to increase, with these effects largely attributed to Eunicea spp.; this pattern is consistent with several processes, one of which is self-thinning. For recruits (