Enhancing ecosystem complexity to promote sustainable fish communities

funded by the alexandria foundation

As habitat complexity degrades, it is important to find means of intervention that can re-create the three-dimensional structure of coral reefs in order to sustain fish populations. This project seeks to understand the impacts of coral restoration out-planting, used as a mechanism to increase reef complexity, on the abundance and diversity of fish populations all the way up the food chain. Ultimately, results of this work could help determine if we can re-create complex reef systems that promote sustainable populations of commercially important fish species. Importantly, if successful this could be used as a mechanism to restore sites where commercially important fish stocks have declined.

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