© 2002 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
BOOK REVIEWS
1 Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195
World Atlas of Coral Reefs. MARK D. SPALDING, CORINNA RAVILIOUS, AND EDMUND P. GREEN. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 2001. 424 pp. (ISBN 0-520-23255-0, $45.00).
Coral reefs occupy only 0.1% of the earth's surface, but their importance far transcends their area. They are islands of high productivity, biomass, and biodiversity surrounded by much less productive seas, and the organisms that create them have altered the face of the earth by building islands and archipelagoes that would not exist were it not for their precipitation of substantial volumes of calcium carbonate.
The United Nations Environmental Program's World Conservation Monitoring Centre has prepared this atlas from a mapping program that began in 1994 and utilizes mainly remote sensing techniques. Its stated purposes are to provide information about the location and status of the world's coral reefs, and to inform travelers to reefs about their basic ecology and "the issues and challenges facing reefs in particular areas."
Part I, "Understanding Coral Reefs," occupies the first hundred pages. It surveys the kinds and global distribution of coral reefs, the main taxa of reef-dwelling organisms, reefs as resources, natural physical and biological as well as anthropogenic threats to reefs, and management and protection schemes, including techniques for their restoration after degradation. This section is generally clear and up-to-date, with some selected references through 2000, but it is highly descriptive and not very analytically incisive. Specifically, it pays lip service to subsidence but fails to show how reefs form and change their configurations over time, why they occur where they do, why light is important for reef construction and growth, and how reef distribution relates to plate tectonics. More attention to and integration of these important factors would have given the general reader keener insights into reef dynamics.
For example, the authors reproduce the first published map of global reef distribution (Darwin, 1842
), but they fail to cite Darwin's color-coding scheme (fringing reefs in red, barrier reefs in light blue, atolls in dark blue) or to mention that overlaying a modern plate map would clearly show Darwin's blue barrier reefs and atolls upstream, and his red fringing reefs downstream, of subduction zones (and some of the latter also over mid-plate hot spots). Plate tectonics has thus provided understanding of the mechanism—subsidence—that Darwin proposed for the relationship of different reef types, much as genetics enabled us to understand the mechanism and confirm his later and more pervasive theory of evolution by natural selection.
The remaining 300 pages of the book comprise the atlas itself, but this term might mislead the unsuspecting user. The maps clearly show the positions of the world's coral reefs, but they occupy only 27% of the pages devoted to the three regional sections: Parts II–IV: Atlantic and Eastern Pacific, Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, and Pacific Ocean [sic; actually the central and western Pacific]. Text, tables, and photographs occupy the rest. The text provides region-specific information on the same topics covered for reefs generally in Part I. Most chapters contain one table that summarizes human population, land, sea and reef areas, reef status and threats, and diversity of prominent reef-associated organisms, and another listing protected reef areas. The photographs are of excellent quality, but some reefs and their inhabitants from above and below the water are more decorative than informative. Many alternate with spectacular images taken by space shuttle astronauts.
As the authors intend, users planning to visit specific reefs will probably seek out the information about them. Specialists however are more likely to check the accounts of reefs they know, and the limited information and documentation may disappoint. In looking up reefs I have studied recently, I noted that the section on Western Australia cites some recent work at Houtman Abrolhos, but not the recent two-volume work on its marine biology (Wells, 1997). The brief section on Papua New Guinea fails to mention the extremely diverse reefs in Hansa Bay, documented in a large series of papers from the Belgian research station on Laing Island (e.g., Claereboudt and Bouillon, 1987). The selected bibliographies at chapter ends consistently provide references to reef geology, but often fail to cite relevant biological compendia, e.g. on reefs in Hawaii (Gulko, 1998) and the Marshall Islands (Devaney et al., 1987).
Although the volume thus leads the user less than adequately to sources of data, it succeeds as a general overview of the global distribution of coral reefs and the current status of their environments and exploitation of their resources.
 |
References |
|---|
TOP
 References |
|---|
Claereboudt, M., and J. Bouillon. 1987. Coral associations, distribution and diversity on Laing Island reef (Papua New Guinea). Indo-Malayan Zool, 4:11-25.
Darwin, C. R. 1842. The structure and distribution of coral reefs. Smith, Elder & Co., London.
Devaney, D. M., E. S. Reese, B. L. Burch, and P. Helfrich.Eds 1987. The natural history of Enewetak Atoll,. Vols. 1 and 2. U.S. Department of Energy, Washington.
Gulko, D. 1998. Hawaiian coral reef ecology. Mutual Publishing, Honolulu.
Wells, F. E.(ed.) 1997. The marine flora and fauna of the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, Western Australia,. Vols. 1 and 2. Western Australian Museum, Perth.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||