As a part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the Al Wajh Bank will soon undergo major
coastal development to be transformed into a sustainable luxury tourist destination, with
goals to safeguard the marine and coastal habitats in order to achieve a net conservation
benefit of 30%. To realize these objectives, it is essential to establish baseline data on the
marine communities to gauge the success of conservation goals. In this study, we
evaluated and compared the taxonomic and functional diversity of reef fish assemblages
between two areas in the Al Wajh Bank, sites inside the lagoon and those outside of it, in
order to establish differences in fish communities across environmental gradients.
Conditions within the lagoon, such as temperature and salinity, have been shown to differ
from most other Red Sea areas and are thought to result in unique fish assemblages.
Underwater assessments of fish communities and benthic composition were conducted
throughout the Al Wajh Bank during cruises in 2016 and 2017. We found that of the 168
fish species recorded, 75 species were exclusive outside the lagoon, 22 were exclusive
inside the lagoon, and 71 species were shared between inside and outside. Sites within the
lagoon had significantly less species richness as well as lower abundances. While
taxonomic composition differed between the two areas, functionally they were very
similar. Two functional metrics (functional richness and functional dispersion) indicated
different levels of functional diversity, while two other metrics (functional evenness and
functional specialization) showed no differences in functional diversity. The outside had
five groups comprising eleven species with functional redundancy; in contrast, the inside
had two species which were functionally redundant. This study was able to establish that
the inside and outside habitats are different and have dissimilar species compositions, yet
the functional characterization of fish assemblages in conserved. These results advocate
for the use of functional diversity metrics as a way to evaluate changes to community
composition, and is an initial assessment towards tracking changes in the fish
communities as coastal development progresses
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/669015 |
| Date | 04 1900 |
| Creators | Ford, Kiana |
| Contributors | Berumen, Michael Lee, Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering (BESE) Division, Brainard, Rusty, Coker, Darren |
| Source Sets | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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