Welcome to the home page of the
Pacific Reef Fish Collaboration
The Pacific Reef Fish Collaboration is an initiative among reef biologists to assess human impacts on reef fish communities across the Pacific. Different locales in the region have been exposed to varying degrees of human pressure in the form of fishing, habitat modification, pollution and sedimentation. Moreover, Pacific reefs exhibit a natural gradient in reef fish diversity, with species richness declining from West to East. The Pacific Reef Fish Collaboration takes advantage of this inherent variability in human exposure and biotic diversity by pooling visual underwater survey data from reefs across the region. The aim of the collaboration is to discover:
what changes humans have caused in reef fish communities through fishing, pollution, eutrophication, sedimentation and alteration of natural disturbance regimes, such as hurricanes, crown-of-thorn starfish outbreaks and coral bleaching events;
whether and how the taxonomic richness and functional diversity of reef fish communities modify the type and severity of human impacts;
which taxa, if any, are likely to have undergone range contractions or declines in abundance suggestive of ecological extinction as a result of human impacts; and
how the taxonomic composition, functional diversity, size structure and productivity of coral reefs are likely to respond to future changes in human population size and socio-economic conditions.
For more information, please follow the links below. If you are a reef biologists interested in potentially joining the collaboration, please do contact us at reeffish@dal.ca