Long term coral reef community dynamics in Virgin Islands National Park
Octocoral community ecology
Early in the new millennium, inspection of the reefs of St. John suggested that soft corals were thriving while stony corals were dying; this observation was similar to events occurring in the Florida Keys. Starting in 2014, a new front to the project was initiated to provide a soft coral “overlay” to the analyses of stony corals, and to strengthen the ability to project the structure and function of coral reefs into the future. The project has conducted a retrospective analysis of soft coral community structure in the legacy photoquadrats, initiated a series of process-oriented studies designed to determine why soft corals are doing so well under present conditions, and began a program of time series analyses that are uniquely matched to the challenges of quantifying three-dimensional and flexible organisms.
Additional projects related to this work can be found here and here.
