Protection of coral reef fish delivers ecosystem-critical biocontrol of coral-eating starfish across the Great Barrier Reef

Crown-of-thorns starfish (CoTS, Acanthaster ssp.) are regarded as
a pest species across the Indo-Pacific, where they are voracious predators
of corals and represent one of the largest causes of coral mortality on
the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). We have incorporated reef fish into a
metacommunity model known as the Coral Community Network (CoCoNet) model
for the GBR to demonstrate the critical role that marine reserves and
other fisheries regulations have played in limiting the prevalence of CoTS
outbreaks and maintaining the resilience of the GBR ecosystem. This
submission includes the CoCoNet model user-guide, the CoCoNet code
(developed in NetLogo), coastline and reef definition files needed to run
the model, and model output files (.csv) generated by the study. Each
output file includes variables for each reef, in each year (annual
timestep), for each run within an ensemble (runs within an ensemble vary
stochastically to capture uncertainty).