A photographic data set of reef and coral communities across Venezuela.

This dataset contains 2850 photographs of the seafloor in coral communities from Venezuela that were taken during 2017 and 2018. We used a hierarchical experimental design with four random factors representing four different spatial scales: (1) region (hundreds of kilometers), (2) localities (tens of kilometers), (2) reef sites (hundreds of meters) and (3) transects (a couple meters) across the Venezuelan coast. At each site, four 30-m transects were deployed parallel to the coastline, and 15 pictures were taken every other meter at each transect, containing an area of at least 80 × 90cm with enough resolution to identify benthic groups.

The use of pseudo-multivariate standard error to improve the sampling design of coral monitoring programs.

The characteristics of coral reef sampling and monitoring are highly variable, with numbers of units and sampling effort varying from one study to another. Numerous works have been carried out to determine an appropriate effect size through statistical power; however, these were always from a univariate perspective. In this work, we used the pseudo multivariate dissimilarity-based standard error (MultSE) approach to assess the precision of sampling scleractinian coral assemblages in reefs of Venezuela between 2017 and 2018 when using different combinations of number of transects, quadrats and points.

Systematic review and meta-analysis of 50 years of coral disease research visualized through the scope of network theory.

Coral disease research encompasses five decades of undeniable progress. Since the first descriptions of anomalous signs, we have come to understand multiple processes and environmental drivers that interact with coral pathologies. In order to gain a better insight into the knowledge we already have, we explored how key topics in coral disease research have been related to each other using network analysis.

Tissue mortality by Caribbean ciliate infection and white band disease in three reef-building coral species.

Caribbean ciliate infection (CCI) and white band disease (WBD) are diseases that affect a multitude of coral hosts and are associated with rapid rates of tissue losses, thus contributing to declining coral cover in Caribbean reefs. In this study we compared tissue mortality rates associated to CCI in three species of corals with different growth forms: Orbicella faveolata (massive-boulder), O. annularis (massive-columnar) and Acropora cervicornis (branching).