10/07/2026
🪸 Deep-sea corals support complex habitats in marine ecosystems that are home to a diversity of organisms. These slow-growing, long-lived organisms are also highly vulnerable to human activities that disturb the seafloor, making it especially important to understand where they occur.
As targets for biodiversity conservation, the distribution of deep-sea corals is important to map, but challenging to accomplish. 📝 A new publication by BRI researcher Dr. Holly Goyert and colleagues uses hierarchical community occupancy modeling to estimate the distribution and richness of 28 deep-sea coral genera across the U.S. Gulf coast. 🌎
📊 Previous modeling efforts have often focused on relative habitat suitability, while this study uses presence and absence data to account for the fact that corals can be present but go undetected.
🗺️ The result is a more complete picture of where deep-sea corals are likely to occur and where coral diversity may be greatest, including information about rarer corals that can be particularly difficult to detect.
🌟 By improving our ability to map deep-sea coral biodiversity, we can help provide better information for conservation and management decisions in these vulnerable marine ecosystems!
marineecosystem
📸: 1- Greater Star Coral (antar_mijail/iNaturalist); 2- Grooved Brain Coral (yutnace30/iNaturalist)
