Environmental fluctuations are becoming increasingly volatile in many ecosystems, highlighting the need to better understand how stochastic and deterministic processes shape patterns of commonness and rarity, particularly in high-diversity systems like coral reefs. We analyzed reef fish time-series across the Great Barrier Reef to show that approximately 75% of the variance in relative species abundance is attributable to deterministic, intrinsic species differences. Nevertheless, the relative importance of stochastic factors is markedly higher on reefs that...

The Global Finprint project is a global scale survey of sharks and rays on coral reefs. It uses baited remote underwater video systems (BRUVS) to collect data. The data stored are all video files from the individual drops. This dataset represents the sampling in the Coral Triangle and Pacific regions of the project.

The whale shark Rhincodon typus is found throughout the world’s tropical and warm-temperate ocean basins. Despite their broad physical distribution, research on the species has been concentrated at a few aggregation sites. Comparing DNA sequences from sharks at different sites can provide a demographically neutral understanding of the whale shark’s global ecology. Here, we created genetic profiles for 84 whale sharks from the Saudi Arabian Red Sea and 72 individuals from the coast of Tanzania...