Animals & nature · 2008
How many might it take to assess reef-fish ?
Based on surveys at four sites in Tanzania, researchers recommend approximately 24 point counts to assess full reef-fish species richness at sites in the Western Indian Ocean. They also found that species differ greatly in how readily they can be detected.
Details
Assessments of coral reef fish biodiversity and community structure often suffer from inadequate sampling and biases in the commonly used Underwater Visual Census (UVC) method. One often-ignored source of bias is that reef-fish species differ in detectability, which may substantially affect biodiversity estimates.
Researchers used highly replicated UVC sampling of all fish species at four sites in Tanzania, East Africa. Detectability varied greatly across species and was affected by traits such as body size and schooling behaviour. The researchers found that detectability could readily be accounted for by applying Capture-Mark-Recapture (CMR) models.
Based on these results, they recommend approximately 24 point counts to assess full reef-fish species richness at sites in the Western Indian Ocean.
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