![]() Data are freely available from the AIMS Data Centre for all researchers upon request. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Received: ApAccepted: JPublished: August 20, 2014Ĭopyright: © 2014 Emslie et al. ![]() PLoS ONE 9(8):Įditor: Maura (Gee) Geraldine Chapman, University of Sydney, Australia ![]() These results add to a growing body of evidence about the importance of habitat complexity for reef fishes, and represent the first large-scale examination of this question on the Great Barrier Reef.Ĭitation: Emslie MJ, Cheal AJ, Johns KA (2014) Retention of Habitat Complexity Minimizes Disassembly of Reef Fish Communities following Disturbance: A Large-Scale Natural Experiment. Our results suggest that the retention of habitat complexity following disturbances can ameliorate the impacts of coral declines on reef fishes, so preserving their capacity to perform important functional roles essential to reef resilience. This resulted in decreased species richness and a loss of diversity within functional groups. Where habitat complexity was substantially reduced, species abundances broadly declined and a far greater number of fish species were locally extirpated, including economically important fishes. Reductions of both live coral cover and habitat complexity had substantial impacts on fish communities compared to relatively minor impacts after major reductions in coral cover but not habitat complexity. Here a natural experiment using a long term (20 year), spatially extensive (∼115,000 kms 2) dataset from the Great Barrier Reef revealed the fundamental importance of overall habitat complexity for reef fishes. While previous studies have highlighted the importance of habitat complexity in structuring reef fish communities, they employed gradient or meta-analyses which lacked a controlled experimental design over broad spatial scales to explicitly separate the influence of live coral cover from overall habitat complexity. ![]() Coral reefs are highly diverse ecosystems, but are under increasing pressure from numerous stressors, many of which reduce live coral cover and habitat complexity with concomitant effects on other organisms such as reef fishes. High biodiversity ecosystems are commonly associated with complex habitats. ![]()
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