Publication Abstract

Marginal and non-reef-building coral environments.

C.T. Perry and P. Larcombe

This special issue of Coral Reefs stems from a thematic session held at the European Meeting of the International Society for Reef Studies held in Cambridge in September 2002. A wide range of papers were presented, covering aspects of oceanography, sediment transport and accumulation, sedimentary settings, species assemblages, coral physiology, and geological evolution. These presentations emphasized the diversity and potential significance of the coral communities that occur in a wide range of what might be described as ‘‘marginal’’ settings, and demonstrated the geological and ecological significance of marginal and non-reefbuilding coral environments. Most papers published in this issue were submitted from researchers who presented work at the Cambridge meeting; however, some additional contributions were also accepted. When we were organizing the thematic session on ‘‘marginal’’ and non-reef-building coral environments at Cambridge, and then in editing this Special Issue, we wondered whether the title of this Special Issue, and specifically the word ‘‘marginal,’’ could be a little misleading (we expand a little on this thought in sections below). In this introductory paper, the term ‘‘marginal’’ marine is used in a broad sense, to describe settings where coral communities or framework reefs occur either close to well-understood (or strongly perceived) environmental thresholds for coral survival (sensu Kleypas et al. 1999) or in areas characterized by ‘‘suboptimal’’ or fluctuating environmental conditions. These include settings characterized by high or low temperatures, salinities, or nutrient levels, or by low light penetration or low aragonite saturation states. We are aware that much of this issue generally considers only one component of an ecological biota, so the use of the term ‘‘coral communities’’ here and in many of the papers in this issue might equally be read as ‘‘coral biotopes",‘‘coral assemblages,’’ or ‘‘ecological assemblages of corals.’’ Further, we use ‘‘framework reefs’’ here to explicitly denote those coral assemblages that have produced accretion through the production of reef framework, and we do not intend this as a contribution to any debate on what does or does not constitute a reef. The settings under consideration in this issue include settings where external factors act to change parameters such as temperature, salinity, nutrient load, and suspended sediment concentrations over a variety of magnitudes and timescales (e.g. ‘‘permanently,’’ seasonally, over lunar and other cycles, and episodically). Such settings may be considered by some as ‘‘marginal’’ in terms of reef-building potential, for example, the production of reef framework, but they are clearly important for maintaining a rich diversity of coral community and reef types, and as localized sites of coral and carbonate sediment production and, in some cases, accumulation.

Reference:

C.T. Perry and P. Larcombe, 2003. Marginal and non-reef-building coral environments. Coral Reefs 22: 427 - 432