RLS Annual Report 2018

• RLS turned 10 years old and held two celebratory events in Perth, WA and Port Stephens, NSW.
• The RLS website saw a 162% increase in the number of sessions and was used by 12,483 people from 154 countries.
• RLS discovered a new population of endangered Red Handfish, Thymichthys politus, on the Tasman Peninsual, with the good-news-story quickly going viral on social media
• 2017/18 saw 941 surveys completed by 64 divers across 355 sites 

Gravity of human impacts mediates coral reef conservation gains. PNAS (2018). Cinner, J.A., et al.

The importance of sponges and mangroves in supporting fish communities on degraded coral reefs in Caribbean Panama. Peer J (2018). Seemann, J. et al.

Species’ thermal ranges predict changes in reef fish community structure during 8 years of extreme temperature variation. Diversity & Distributions (2018). Day, P.B. et al.

Pollution signature for temperate ref biodiversity is short and simple. Marine Pollution Bulletin (2018). Ling, S.D. et al.

Moving beyond trophic groups: evaluating fishing-induced changes to temperate reef food webs. Marine Ecology Progress Series (2018). Soler, G.A. et al.

Key drivers of effectiveness in small marine protected areas. Biodiversity and Conservation (2018). Turnbull, J.W., et al. 

Thermal limits to the geographic distributions of shallow-water marine species. Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017). Stuart-Smith, R.D., Edgar, G.J. & Bates, A.E.

Abundance and local-scale processes contribute to multi-phyla gradients in global marine biodiversity. Science Advances (2017). Edgar, G.J. et al.

Fishing-gear restrictions and biomass gains for coral reef fishes in marine protected areas. Conservation Biology (2017). Campbell, S.J. et al.