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Quantifying coral morphology

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Zawada_2019_CR_Coralmorphology_CC.pdf (1.233Mb)
Date
12/2019
Author
Zawada, Kyle
Dornelas, Maria
Madin, Joshua S.
Funder
John Templeton Foundation
Grant ID
60501
Keywords
Functional morphology
Scleractinia
3D scanning
Shape analysis
Traits
Growth form
GC Oceanography
QH301 Biology
NDAS
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Abstract
Coral morphology has important implications across scales, from differences in physiology, to the environments they are found, through to their role as ecosystem engineers. However, quantifying morphology across taxa is difficult, and so morphological variation is typically captured via coarse growth form categories (e.g. arborescent and massive). In this study, we develop an approach for quantifying coral morphology by identifying continuous three-dimensional shape variables. To do so, we contrast six variables estimated from 152 laser scans of coral colonies that ranged across seven growth form categories and three orders of magnitude of size. We found that 88% of the variation in shape was captured by two principal components. The main component was variation in volume compactness (cf. convexity), and the second component was a trade-off between surface complexity and top-heaviness. Variation in volume compactness also limited variation along the second axis, where surface complexity and top-heaviness ranged more freely when compactness was low. Traditional growth form categories occupied distinct regions within this morphospace; however, these regions overlapped due to scaling of shape variables with colony size. Nonetheless, with four of the shape variables we were able to predict traditional growth form categories with 70 to 95% accuracy, suggesting that the continuous variables captured most of the qualitative variations implied by these growth forms. Distilling coral morphology into continuous variables that capture shape variation will allow for better tests of the mechanisms that govern coral biology, ecology and ecosystem services such as reef building and provision of habitat.
Citation
Zawada , K , Dornelas , M & Madin , J S 2019 , ' Quantifying coral morphology ' , Coral Reefs , vol. 38 , pp. 1281–1292 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01842-4
Publication
Coral Reefs
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01842-4
ISSN
0722-4028
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Funding: John Templeton Foundation (60501), Australian Research Council (FT110100609), Leverhulme Trust.
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18249

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