ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia.
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2021 May;5(5):663-669. doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01393-4. Epub 2021 Mar 1.
Knowledge of a species' abundance is critically important for assessing its risk of extinction, but for the vast majority of wild animal and plant species such data are scarce at biogeographic scales. Here, we estimate the total number of reef-building corals and the population sizes of more than 300 individual species on reefs spanning the Pacific Ocean biodiversity gradient, from Indonesia to French Polynesia. Our analysis suggests that approximately half a trillion corals (0.3 × 10-0.8 × 10) inhabit these coral reefs, similar to the number of trees in the Amazon. Two-thirds of the examined species have population sizes exceeding 100 million colonies, and one-fifth of the species even have population sizes greater than 1 billion colonies. Our findings suggest that, while local depletions pose imminent threats that can have ecologically devastating impacts to coral reefs, the global extinction risk of most coral species is lower than previously estimated.
物种丰度的知识对于评估其灭绝风险至关重要，但对于绝大多数野生动物和植物物种来说，在生物地理尺度上，此类数据十分匮乏。在这里，我们估算了从印度尼西亚到法属波利尼西亚的太平洋生物多样性梯度上的珊瑚礁上造礁珊瑚的总数和 300 多个单个物种的种群规模。我们的分析表明，这些珊瑚礁上大约有 5 千万亿到 8 千万亿株珊瑚（0.3×10-0.8×10），与亚马逊的树木数量相当。三分之二的受检物种的种群规模超过 1 亿个群体，五分之一的物种甚至有超过 10 亿个群体的种群规模。我们的研究结果表明，虽然局部损耗构成了迫在眉睫的威胁，可能对珊瑚礁产生生态破坏性影响，但大多数珊瑚物种的全球灭绝风险低于先前的估计。
