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The process of coral larval dispersal is important for coral reef ecosystems, but remains poorly understood and hard to gauge. Better knowledge of inter-reef connectivity patterns would be useful in enabling better management of coral reef waters however. By employing a spatially explicit numerical modelling approach, we simulate larval dispersal through the central section of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), comprising over 1000 reefs, and identify spatial patterns in the inter-reef connectivity network using a community detection method from network science. This paper presents the modelling approach used and discusses the significance of the results.

Inter-reef connectivity networks were estimated for 4 different coral species, and significant differences between them were found. We show how we can partition reefs into clusters, or “communities”, that are sparsely connected with each other, and therefore identify …