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Reposted by Bex Turner

Royal Society Publishing @royalsocietypublishing.org · 11/06/2025

Local human impacts interact with geography to drive benthic community depth zonation on contemporary coral reefs #ProcB - find out more from authors in our blog - royalsociety.org/blog/2025/06...

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Bex Turner @bexturner.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Image credit - Brian Zgliczynski

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Bex Turner @bexturner.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

💥🚶‍♀️We also found evidence of human-disrupted changes to benthic community depth zonation; patterns were inversed across depths and less distinct at populated compared to unpopulated islands within two ecoregions.

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Bex Turner @bexturner.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

💥🌍At the three ecoregions where depth zonation existed, there was no universal ‘natural’ zonation pattern and the benthic groups most responsible for driving patterns of depth zonation differed across geographies.

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Bex Turner @bexturner.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

💥🌊We found across our Pacific Ocean study system, depth zonation did not always occur at the taxonomic resolution of our data (broad benthic groups). In fact, we only saw evidence of depth zonation at 3/6 ecoregions.

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Bex Turner @bexturner.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

New paper 📢 Coral reef depth zonation patterns are not 'universal' and may be disrupted by local human impacts. We show evidence of spatially dependent effects of depth on benthic community structure across the Pacific Ocean. 🌊🧵⬇️

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