Lauriane Ribas-Deulofeu

National Taiwan University | NTU · Institute of Oceanography

As climate changes and anthropogenic pressures increase, marine ecosystem assembly and functioning are altered. High-latitude areas may provide opportunities for some tropical and subtropical organisms to survive. Yet, it is difficult to assess ongoing changes as ecological baselines are often missing. Here, we focus on the rapidly warming region o...

Coastal prehistoric settlement is a prominent topic in archaeology and is often associated with marine food supply for subsistence. In Taiwan and the tropical West Pacific area, early humans have relied on marine resources since the Palaeolithic period. However, in general, understanding past marine subsistence in Taiwan is impeded by scarce data o...

The recently exposed outcrops along the Dahan River in Shulin, northern Taiwan revealed diverse and abundant marine fossils including molluscs, shark and ray teeth, sand dollars, and otoliths from a wide range of fish taxa. In addition, numerous small and fragile fossil scleractinians were found and identified here as Dendrophyllia sp., from the ma...

Structural complexity is an important feature to understand reef resilience abilities, through its role in mediating predator-prey interactions, regulating competition, and promoting recruitment. Most of the current methods used to measure reef structural complexity fail to quantify the contributions of fine and coarse scales of rugosity simultaneo...

Over the past few decades, extreme events -such as ocean warming, typhoons, and coral bleaching- have been increasing in intensity and frequency, threatening coral reefs from the physiological to ecosystem level. In the present study, the impacts of rising seawater temperatures, typhoons, and coral bleaching events on benthic communities were seaso...

Without drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate globalized stressors, tropical coral reefs are in jeopardy. Strategic conservation and management requires identification of the environmental and socioeconomic factors driving the persistence of scleractinian coral assemblages—the foundation species of coral reef ecosystems. Here, we...

Without appropriate conservation action, coral reefs globally continue to degrade, causing declines in economic value. Therefore, their local conservation and quantifying its benefits become increasingly important. However, accurately measuring these values remains expensive or complicated. Leveraging digital survey tools, an interdisciplinary on-l...

Colony morphological features is among the best predictor of the scleractinian coral's function in reef ecosystems. However, morphological traits are categorical and to convert this information into a quantitative value as well as estimate their influence on ecosystem process remain a challenge. Here, we propose a trait-based approach to quantify m...

The distribution and the structure of benthic assemblages vary with latitude. However, few studies have described benthic communities along large latitudinal gradients, and patterns of variation are not fully understood. Taiwan, lying between 21.90°N and 25.30°N, is located at the center of the Philippine-Japan arc and lies at the northern margin o...

Most studies on endosymbiotic dinoflagellate algae (genus Symbiodinium) associated with scleractinian corals focus on tropical and sub-tropical reefs. Their diversity in outlying, non-reef coral communities at high latitudes is still not fully documented. In this study, we analyzed the Symbiodinium diversity associated with five scleractinian speci...

The zooxanthellate scleractinian coral, Alveopora japonica Eguchi, 1968, inhabits high-latitude waters from southern Taiwan to mainland Japan. This species may have benefited from recent increase in seawater temperature, and it has been hypothesized that a shift from kelp forest to coral dominance may be occurring at some locations at the edge of i...