Coral disease prevalence estimation and sampling design.

ABSTRACT: In the last decades diseases have changed coral communities' structure and function in reefs worldwide. Studies conducted to evaluate the effect of diseases on corals frequently use modified adaptations of sampling designs that were developed to study ecological aspects of coral reefs. Here we evaluate how efficient these sampling protocols are by generating virtual data for a coral population parameterized with mean coral density and disease prevalence estimates from the Caribbean scleractinian Orbicella faveolata at the Mexican Caribbean. Six scenarios were tested consisting of three patterns of coral colony distribution (random, randomly clustered and randomly over-dispersed) and two disease transmission modes (random and contagious). The virtual populations were sampled with the

SUBMITTER: Jordan-Dahlgren E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6282945 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature