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Influence of landscape structure on reef fish assemblages

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Abstract

Management of tropical marine environments calls for interdisciplinary studies and innovative methodologies that consider processes occurring over broad spatial scales. We investigated relationships between landscape structure and reef fish assemblage structure in the US Virgin Islands. Measures of landscape structure were transformed into a reduced set of composite indices using principal component analyses (PCA) to synthesize data on the spatial patterning of the landscape structure of the study reefs. However, composite indices (e.g., habitat diversity) were not particularly informative for predicting reef fish assemblage structure. Rather, relationships were interpreted more easily when functional groups of fishes were related to individual habitat features. In particular, multiple reef fish parameters were strongly associated with reef context. Fishes responded to benthic habitat structure at multiple spatial scales, with various groups of fishes each correlated to a unique suite of variables. Accordingly, future experiments should be designed to test functional relationships based on the ecology of the organisms of interest. Our study demonstrates that landscape-scale habitat features influence reef fish communities, illustrating promise in applying a landscape ecology approach to better understand factors that structure coral reef ecosystems. Furthermore, our findings may prove useful in design of spatially-based conservation approaches such as marine protected areas (MPAs), because landscape-scale metrics may serve as proxies for areas with high species diversity and abundance within the coral reef landscape.

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Acknowledgements

Support provided by the Biological Resources Division of the USGS, the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences at the University of Florida, the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund, the Canon Science Scholars program, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and the National Park Service. Reef fish sampling conducted by Jim Beets, Alan Friedlander, Nicholas Wolff, and RGD. Dr. Caroline Rogers, Rafe Boulon, Jeff Miller and Jim Petterson at the Virgin Islands National Park helped facilitate this research. This manuscript was greatly improved thanks to comments from Victor Bonito, Sky Notestein, Stephanie Keller, and NOAA’s Biogeography Team.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, University of Florida, 7922 NW 71st Street, Gainesville, FL, 32653, USA

    Rikki Grober-Dunsmore, Thomas K. Frazer & William J. Lindberg

  2. US Geological Survey, 7920 NW 71st Street, Gainesville, FL, 32653, USA

    Rikki Grober-Dunsmore & Nicholas A. Funicelli

  3. Department of Marine Sciences, University of Hawaii-Hilo, 200 W Kawili Street, Hilo, HI, 96720, USA

    James P. Beets

  4. Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32601, USA

    Paul Zwick

  5. National Marine Protected Areas Center, NOAA, 110 Shaffer Rd., Santa Cruz, CA, 95060, USA

    Rikki Grober-Dunsmore

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  1. Rikki Grober-Dunsmore
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  3. James P. Beets
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Correspondence to Rikki Grober-Dunsmore.

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Grober-Dunsmore, R., Frazer, T.K., Beets, J.P. et al. Influence of landscape structure on reef fish assemblages. Landscape Ecol 23 (Suppl 1), 37–53 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-007-9147-x

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