[Coral-List] Biodiversity of Coral Reef Ecosystems Session
Rusty Brainard
Rusty.Brainard at noaa.gov
Mon Oct 17 23:00:41 EDT 2005
Dear colleagues,
Please note the session OS109 "Biodiversity of Coral Reef Ecosystems"
for the upcoming 2006 Ocean Sciences Meeting, February 20-24, in
Hawaii. We encourage you to submit abstracts until the deadline of 20
October 2005 (THIS THURSDAY). Details are accessible from
http://www.agu.org/meetings/os06/.
Best wishes,
The conveners: Rusty Brainard, Julian Caley, Nancy Knowlton
OS109 "Biodiversity of Coral Reef Ecosystems"
Description:
Coral reefs are among the most diverse and biologically complex marine
ecosystems in the world. They provide: tremendous economic and
environmental resource value to millions of people, shoreline
protection, aesthetic and recreational significance, commercial and
subsistence food sources, pharmaceuticals and medicines, and numerous
jobs and revenue generators. Coral reef ecosystems are deteriorating at
alarming rates due to multiple anthropogenic and environmental
stressors. These changes to coral reef ecosystems highlight a need for
scientists to share past and present research results, as well as future
resource management and research concepts relating to global reef
biodiversity. An international, cooperative effort contributing to the
taxonomically diversified global census of coral reef ecosystems, is
currently being developed for the Census of Marine Life (CoML). The
goals of this project are to increase tropical taxonomic expertise and
improve access to, as well as unify, coral reef ecosystem information
scattered throughout the globe. This session hopes to gather
international scientists to begin to address some of the following
questions. What are the patterns of species diversity for understudied
reef-associated groups, such as invertebrate and algal communities,
across gradients of human disturbance? What kinds of species are
obligately associated with healthy coral reefs and how widely are they
distributed? What are the prospects for maintenance of species diversity
on reefs suffering various levels of human impacts? How much and what
kinds of taxonomic and ecological information are required to manage
reefs effectively? In this particular session, topics of interest
include, but are not limited to, taxonomic focus in the biodiversity of
such understudied groups as sponges, octocorals, mollusks, polychaetes,
crustaceans, echinoderms, tunicates, seagrasses, macroalgae, coralline
algae, turf algae, and cyanobacteria, as well as advancement in
technology and sampling strategies relative to these foci.
Conveners:
Russell E. Brainard
/NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center/
Coral Reef Ecosystem Division
1125B Ala Moana Blvd.
Honolulu, HI, USA 96814
(808)592-7011; rusty.brainard at noaa.gov <mailto:rusty.brainard at noaa.gov>
Julian Caley
/Australian Institute of Marine Science/
PMB 3
Townsville MC, AUS 4810
+617-4753-4148; j.caley at aims.gov.au <mailto:j.caley at aims.gov.au>
Nancy Knowlton
/Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation/
Scripps Institution of Oceanograpgy
Univeristy of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA, USA 92093-0202
(858) 822-2486; nknowlton at ucsd.edu <mailto:nknowlton at ucsd.edu>
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