Stationary Visual Census Technique for Quantitatively Assessing Community Structure of Coral Reef Fishes

摘要

A new method is described and evaluated for visually sampling reef fish community structure in environments with highly diverse and abundant reef fish populations. The method is based on censuses of reef fishes taken within a cylinder of 7.5m radius by a diver at randomly selected, stationary points. The method provides quantitative data on frequency of occurrence, fish length, abundance, and community composition, and is simple, fast, objective, and repeatable.