Abstract
Recruitment is now widely recognized as a fundamental process governing spatial patterns, dynamics, and maintenance of marine invertebrate communities. Moreover, recruitment is a critical factor for successful recovery following disturbances and thus resilience of ecosystems. Over the last decades, tropical coral reefs, which are one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth and provide goods and services to ~500 million people, have been confronted with various types of natural and anthropogenic disturbances, causing widespread mortality of reef-building coral species. In this context, understanding processes of coral recruitment and their patterns in time and space is a fundamental step to understand, detect, and predict the effects of climate change on reef ecosystems. Despite major advancements in the last three decades, our understanding of some critical phases of coral recruitment processes remains too limited for their integration into management and conservation actions that are urgently needed for this unique ecosystem. Here, we synthesize and analyze existing literature on coral recruitment to determine the state of knowledge, identify knowledge gaps, and suggest future lines of research. We particularly focus on the spatiotemporal variability of recruitment and its controlling factors, the relative importance of pre- and post-settlement events and life strategies in the maintenance of adult assemblages, and the critical role of recruitment for the recovery and resilience of disturbed reef communities.
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The authors are thankful to Maureen Ho and Andrew G. Carroll for improvements on the manuscript.
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Adjeroud, M., Kayal, M., Penin, L. (2017). Importance of Recruitment Processes in the Dynamics and Resilience of Coral Reef Assemblages. In: Rossi, S., Bramanti, L., Gori, A., Orejas , C. (eds) Marine Animal Forests. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21012-4_12
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