Diel versus time-integrated (daily) photosynthesis and irradiance relationships of coral reef organisms and communities.

ABSTRACT: The most important source of energy to tropical shallow water coral reefs is light, the transformation of which ultimately limits reef biomass and growth. Therefore, measurements of productivity (primary production, P) for benthic reef organisms and communities are critical to understand reef functioning. Short-term (minutes to hours) P measurements of reef photosynthesizers virtually always produce the classic hyperbolic tangent (or similar) P-E (irradiance) relationship, with P rapidly rising to a saturation point as E increases. Longer-term (days to weeks), larger-scale investigations of natural reef communities typically do not explore P-E relationships, but the few that do show no saturation of time-integrated P with high time-integrated E. In this paper we present a modeling study to

SUBMITTER: Sawall Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6296501 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature