Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Coral Reefs 32 (2013): 737-748, doi:10.1007/s00338-013-1055-8.
Description:
The Red Sea has long been recognized as a region of high biodiversity and endemism.
Despite this diversity and early history of scientific work, our understanding of the
ecology of coral reefs in the Red Sea has lagged behind that of other large coral reef
systems. We carried out a quantitative assessment of ISI-listed research published from
the Red Sea in eight specific topics (apex predators, connectivity, coral bleaching, coral
reproductive biology, herbivory, marine protected areas, non-coral invertebrates and reef
associated bacteria) and compared the amount of research conducted in the Red Sea to
that of the Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and the Caribbean. On average, for these
eight topics, the Red Sea had 1/6th the amount of research compared to the GBR and
about 1/8th the amount of the Caribbean. Further, more than 50% of the published
research from the Red Sea originated from the Gulf of Aqaba, a small area (〈 2% of the
area of the Red Sea) in the far northern Red Sea. We summarize the general state of
knowledge in these eight topics and highlight areas of future research priorities for the
Red Sea region. Notably, data that could inform science-based management approaches
is badly lacking in most Red Sea countries. The Red Sea, as a geologically “young” sea
located in one of the warmest regions of the world, has the potential to provide insight to
pressing topics such as speciation processes as well as the capacity of reef systems and
organisms to adapt to global climate change. As one of the world’s most biodiverse coral
reef regions, the Red Sea may yet have a significant role to play in our understanding of
coral reef ecology at a global scale.
Description:
2014-06-21
Keywords:
Apex predators
;
Connectivity
;
Coral bleaching
;
Coral reproduction
;
Herbivory
;
Marine protected area
;
Porifera
;
Reef-associated bacteria
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
Format:
application/vnd.ms-excel
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