Publication Date
2019
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Volker Bahn (Advisor), Thomas Rooney (Committee Member), Lisa Kenyon (Committee Member), Leonard Kenyon (Other)
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Abstract
The coral reefs within Indonesia’s Wakatobi Marine National Park support a high diversity of reef-building hard corals and associated marine fish. Climate change threatens to dramatically affect coral reef ecosystems by altering the interactions between reef fish and the specific microhabitats they depend on for survival. To examine the spatially varied effects of habitat complexity on the community composition and trophic structure of marine fish assemblages, I analyzed fish community and habitat complexity data across reef zones. Habitat complexity metrics were: structural complexity, the percentage of hard coral (HC) cover, HC genera richness, HC genera diversity (Shannon index), and HC growth form diversity (Shannon index). The community composition of fish assemblages was significantly positively related to habitat complexity, reef zones, and reef systems. This study found that the overall direction and strength of relationships between the fish community and coral reef habitat complexity data varies spatially between reef zones. Marine conservation and restoration efforts need to include specific management plans that vary among reef zones based on how varied habitat complexity and fish communities are at local scales.
Page Count
96
Department or Program
Department of Biological Sciences
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Copyright
Copyright 2019, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
ORCID ID
0000-0002-4798-5885
