Winners and losers of reef flattening: An assessment of coral reef fish species and traits

Anthropogenic stressors are causing widespread coral mortality, leading to loss of coral cover and decreased structural complexity that threatens reef biodiversity, functioning, and ecosystem services. Reef fishes are intimately linked to coral reef complexity, but we lack a generic understanding of which species are particularly affected by reef flattening and what traits make them susceptible. We used extensive species- and trait-based analyses to build a framework for western Atlantic fish association with both structural complexity and coral cover to better understand the implications of reef degradation. These analyses also investigated the relative importance of live coral versus the value of the structure it provides to reef fishes. We modeled how 25 biophysical and anthropogenic factors correlated with the densities of 109 fish species across 3292 Floridian reef sites. The importance of a metric of structural complexity and coral cover to the abundance of each species was then i..., Reef and fish survey data
Since 1979, NOAA has conducted fishery-independent coral reef fish and benthic surveys across southeast Florida as part of the Reef Visual Census (RVC) and National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) (Bohnsack et al. 1999; Smith et al. 2011; NOAA 2017). Sites were surveyed annually (before 2014) or biennially (2014 to present) using a two-stage stratified random sampling scheme in conjunction with a 100x100 m resolution grid covering Florida’s Coral Reef. The first stage stratified grid cells by habitat type within three sub-jurisdictions (Florida Keys, Dry Tortugas/Marquesas, and Southeast Florida), and survey sites were randomly selected within each 100x100 m cell. One or two diver pairs conduct stationary point counts and size assessments of over 500 species of fish (see Bohnsack and Bannerot 1986 for details of this approach), visually estimate benthic coral cover, and measure rugosity based on maximum vertical relief of the substrate within individual 7..., , #Winners and losers of reef flattening: An assessment of coral reef fish species and traits
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Datasets include density data for 109 fish species included in the analysis, environmental data used for the density analysis, and a trait table which includes the response variables of association with relief and coral cover.

## Description of the data and file structure

SpecAbund.xlsx - data used for the boosted regression tree models for fish species density. Includes all density information 109 species and all environmental variables
SiteEnv.xlsx - environmental data extracted from geospatial layers and matched to fish survey sites. Already merged with the species dataset in SpecAbund.xlsx but included as a smaller file
traits\_combined\_2023.xlsx - trait data and response variables used for the trait analysis. Response variables extracted from boosted regression tree models and traits derived from literature and FishBase

Columns in SpecAbund and SiteEnv:
site: numeric site descriptor...