Search

The structure of coral-reef fish assemblages is affected by natural and anthropogenic factors such as the architectural complexity, benthic composition and physical characteristics of the habitat, fishing pressure and land-based input. The coral-reef ecosystem of South Kona, Hawai'i hosts diverse reef habitats with a relatively high live coral cover, but a limited number of studies have focused on the ecosystem or the fish assemblages. Here, we surveyed fish assemblages at 119 sites in South Kona in 2020 and 2021 and investigated the associations between the fish assemblages and environmental variables obtained from published Geographic Information System (GIS) layers, including depth, latitude, reef rugosity, housing density and benthic cover. The fish assemblages in South Kona were dominated by a relatively small number of widely occurring species. Multivariate analyses indicated that fish assemblage structure strongly correlated with depth, reefscape-level rugosity and sand cover individually, while the final parsimonious model included latitude, depth, housing density within 3-km of shore, chlorophyll-a concentration and sand cover. Univariate analysis revealed negative associations between housing density and fish species richness and abundance. Effects of environmental factors specific to fish trophic groups were also found. Reefscape-level rugosity had strong positive influences on the distributions of all herbivores (browsers, grazers and scrapers), while housing density had strong negative influences only on the abundance of browsers. Positive associations were also found between live coral cover and the presence of scrapers, as well as the abundance of corallivorous fish. This study intensively surveyed shallow coral reefs along the coastline of South Kona and was the most complete spatial survey on the reef fish assemblages to date. As it utilized GIS layers to assess large-scale patterns in the fish assemblages, future studies including in-situ environmental data may further reveal local-scale patterns and insights into factors affecting the structure of fish assemblages in Hawai'i. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factors controlling savanna woody vegetation structure vary at multiple spatial and temporal scales, and as a consequence, unraveling their combined effects has proven to be a classic challenge in savanna ecology. We used airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to map three-dimensional woody vegetation structure throughout four savanna watersheds, each contrasting in geologic substrate and climate, in Kruger National Park, South Africa. By comparison of the four watersheds, we found that geologic substrate had a stronger effect than climate in determining watershed-scale differences in vegetation structural properties, including cover, height and crown density. Generalized Linear Models were used to assess the spatial distribution of woody vegetation structural properties, including cover, height and crown density, in relation to mapped hydrologic, topographic and fire history traits. For each substrate and climate combination, models incorporating topography, hydrology and fire history explained up to 30% of the remaining variation in woody canopy structure, but inclusion of a spatial autocovariate term further improved model performance. Both crown density and the cover of shorter woody canopies were determined more by unknown factors likely to be changing on smaller spatial scales, such as soil texture, herbivore abundance or fire behavior, than by our mapped regional-scale changes in topography and hydrology. We also detected patterns in spatial covariance at distances up to 50–450 m, depending on watershed and structural metric. Our results suggest that large-scale environmental factors play a smaller role than is often attributed to them in determining woody vegetation structure in southern African savannas. This highlights the need for more spatially-explicit, wide-area analyses using high resolution remote sensing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]