Abstract Summary
Decisions on the choice of locations for construction or dredging involving coral community damage, and on required compensatory mitigation actions for both planned and unplanned damage, generally require ecological forecasting capabilities. U.S. federal laws, in particular, focus on estimated losses of ecosystem services over time and their replacement – often in the form of on-site restoration and/or the development of new areas of similar ecological habitat. CoralPatchSim software can assist in providing such forecasting capabilities. In combination with in-situ measurements of coral diameters, information on growth forms, competition hierarchy, and other traits from literature and online sources, the program projects coral community development on a spatially explicit, 2-D, centimeter-resolution grid. ‘Species’ can actually be genus-form combinations. Storm disturbance frequency and magnitude can be varied. The fine resolution facilitates the inclusion of stationary coral fragments. Program outputs include estimates over time of bottom cover, volumes, surface areas, calcium carbonate production, and the refuge volumes available to fish by size-category for the simulated communities. The estimation equations are based on generalized geometries of major habitat-structuring benthos, and so will be applicable globally. The software is complementary to other available tools, including the ReefBudget methodology, the Coral Trait Database, the Indo Pacific Coral Finder and other field guides, as well as habitat equivalency analyses via spreadsheets or the Visual_HEA Software. Suggestions are provided for applying existing data, and for efficiently obtaining new field data for the analyses.
