“Coral Dominance”: A Dangerous Ecosystem Misnomer?
Figure 3
Examples of two reef systems monitored by NOAA’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Division. (a) Kingman Reef, US Line Islands. Kingman Reef contains areas exhibiting extremely dense and diverse scleractinian coral communities. Although this tropical marine ecosystem may approximate the idealized image of reef health held by the general public and some management agencies, this type of tropical reef community is one end of a spectrum that ranges from coral-dominated to algal-dominated environments in the healthy reef ecosystems monitored by NOAA on tropical to subtropical Pacific Islands. (b) Pearl and Hermes Atoll, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Containing ~5% cover of scleractinian corals, this healthy reef system contains dense pavements of crustose coralline red algae overgrown by the foliose green macroalga, Microdictyon, which in turn is often covered with turf algal epiphytes. Such reef environments with relatively low coral cover are more representative of many types of reef communities monitored by NOAA on tropical to subtropical Pacific Islands than the coral-dominated environment picture in Figure 2(a). Photo credit: Cristi L. Braun (CRED).
