Ecological theory predicts that ecosystems with multiple basins of attraction can get locked in an undesired state, which has profound ecological and management implications. Despite their significance, alternative attractors have proven to be challenging to detect and characterize in natural communities. On coral reefs, it has been hypothesized that persistent coral-to-macroalgae ‘phase shifts’ that can result from overfishing of herbivores and/or nutrient enrichment may reflect a regime shift to an alternate attractor, but to date the evidence has been equivocal.

Stable between-group differences in collective behavior have been documented in a variety of social taxa. Here we evaluate the effects of such variation, often termed collective or colony-level personality, on coral recovery in a tropical marine farmerfish system. Groups of the farmerfish Stegastes nigricans cultivate and defend gardens of palatable algae on coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific. These gardens can promote the recruitment, growth, and survival of corals by providing a refuge from coral predation.

These data report the number of Pocilloporid, Acroporid and Poritiid corals recruiting annually to permanent 5 m X 5 m plots established at a depth of approximately 10 m on the forereef of Moorea, French Polynesia. Plots were established following an outbreak (2007-2010) of the corallivorous crown-of-thorns seastars (Acanthaster planci) and the close passage of Cyclone Oli to Moorea in February, 2010.

The study was conducted in April 2015 in Moorea, French Polynesia, using colonies of Pocillopora verrucosa (~ 4 cm in planar diameter) collected from the outer reef of the north shore at 10–12 m depth. Corals were collected from multiple sites separated by 100-200 m on the outer reef to maximize the likelihood that the selected coral colonies were genetically unique, and transferred directly to an acclimation tank.

In this study, lipid utilization and biological parameters of planula larvae of the cauliflower coral Pocillopora damicornis under future ocean conditions were examined using manipulative experiments. For the first 24 h following their release, planulae were cultured in seawater controlled to mimic a future ocean scenario (1030 μatm pCO2, 30.7 °C) as well as present-day, ambient ocean conditions (475 μatm pCO2, 28.1 °C; confirmed by autonomous sensors deployed at our study site).

This repository contains the Moorea portion of a larger data package published in conjuncture with: "Towards automated annotation of benthic survey images: variability of human experts and operational modes of automation", Beijbom et al. PLOS One, 2015. The rest of the data package is hosted at the Dryad data repository (doi:10.5061/dryad.m5pr3). The larger data package is an aggregate dataset from four Pacific coral reef monitoring projects in: Moorea (French Polynesia), the northern Line Islands, Nanwan Bay (Taiwan) and Heron Reef (Australia).

The Moorea Labeled Corals dataset is a subset of the MCR LTER packaged for computer vision research. It contains 2055 images from three habitats IDs: fringing reef outer 10m and outer 17m, from 2008, 2009 and 2010. It also contains random point annotation (row, col, label) for the nine most abundant labels, four non coral labels: (1) Crustose Coralline Algae (CCA), (2) Turf algae, (3) Macroalgae and (4) Sand, and five coral genera: (5) Acropora, (6) Pavona, (7) Montipora, (8) Pocillopora, and (9) Porites. These nine classes account for 96% of the annotations and total to almost 400,000 points.

This dataset includes the results of a survey on fish sold by the roadside in Moorea, French Polynesia. During 2020-2022, more than 7000 fish were identified and sized from photographs taken during the market surveys. These data were collected as part of CNH-L: Multiscale Dynamics of Coral Reef Fisheries: Feedbacks Between Fishing Practices, Livelihood Strategies, and Shifting Dominance of Coral and Algae (BCS-1714704) with additional support from the Moorea Coral Reef LTER (OCE- 1637396). This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No.

These data describe the results of outer reef surveys that are conducted on an irregular schedule to quantify coral reef community dynamics on a scale of kilometers. The first island-wide survey was completed in 2006, and the second in 2010; we anticipate conducting such surveys every 5-6 years or as needed to capture the large-scale effects of disturbance regimes. The island-wide sampling adds 3 new sites per shore (for a total of 5 sites/shore with the fixed LTER sites) in each year that the larger scale analyses are completed.

These data describe the recruitment of scleractinian corals to unglazed terracotta tiles secured independently to horizontal reef surfaces. The tiles are positioned horizontally to create a cryptic habitat beneath (approximately 1 cm high) and are in place approximately 6 months at a time; they are replaced ca. January and September. The tiles are bleached and inspected for coral skeletons using a dissecting microscope. Coral recruits are resolved to three families (Poritidae, Acroporidae, Pocilloporidae, and "others") and are scored on upper, lower and side surfaces.

The influence of density-dependent and number-dependent processes on individual demographic rates often results in ecological tradeoffs. Because such processes have important implications for individual level fitness and population regulation, they long have been an important topic in ecological research. I used Dascyllus trimaculatus, a site-attached planktivorous coral reef fish, to determine independently the effects of population density and group size on rates of individual growth and mortality. Somatic growth of D. trimaculatus was positively related to the density of D.