Abstract Summary
Coral restoration projects have been established to facilitate the recovery of coral throughout the Florida Keys. To optimize coral restoration success, identifying the ecological conditions and habitats that promote coral survival need to be identified. Since herbivory is one of the most important ecological factors effecting coral settlement, recruitment, and survival, it is necessary to determine factors controlling herbivore populations. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify reef habitat features that facilitate and influence herbivorous fish assemblages. We quantitatively evaluated herbivorous fish assemblages among different reef habitats throughout the Florida Keys using data from the Reef Visual Census monitoring program. This program collects abundance and size data for fish species and the associated benthic coverage information throughout the Keys. The assessment of these data provided an overview of herbivorous fish species composition for various reef habitats, a correlation between trophic and benthic composition (i.e. algal versus coral dominated reef), and a “baseline” of herbivore communities found in natural habitats and available to restoration programs in the Keys. This analysis demonstrates the importance of long term monitoring to understand the spatial variation in herbivorous fish assemblages available to coral restoration sites. Future work will review the extent to which these baseline patterns can be used to predict the relationship between the recruitment of herbivore fish to restoration sites and to restoration sites influenced by the addition of artificial habitat. These analyses will provide managers with information to increase the success of restoration efforts to rebuild coral reefs in the Florida Keys.
