MPB-07182; No of Pages 7 Marine Pollution Bulletin xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

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Marine Pollution Bulletin journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpolbul

An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context John A. Burt a,⁎, Edward G. Smith a, Christopher Warren b, Jennifer Dupont b a b

New York University Abu Dhabi, PO Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates ExxonMobil Research Qatar, Qatar Science and Technology Park, Tech 2, PO Box 22500, Doha, Qatar

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 2 July 2015 Received in revised form 6 September 2015 Accepted 15 September 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Arabian Gulf Persian Gulf Coral bleaching Phase shift Marine management Doha

a b s t r a c t Qatar's once extensive coral communities have undergone considerable change in recent decades. We quantitatively surveyed three coral assemblages in Qatar to assess current status, and compared these against 14 sites in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to evaluate Qatar in a larger biogeographic context. Umm Al-Arshan had the highest species richness of 17 sites examined in the southern Arabian Gulf, as well as the highest coral cover and the only Acropora observed on sites in Qatar. Coral cover and richness were more modest at Fuwayrit and Al-Ashat, reflecting greater impacts from earlier stress events. Two distinct communities were identified across the southern Gulf, with Umm Al-Arshan clustering with high-cover, mixed merulinid/poritid assemblages that were less impacted by earlier bleaching and long-term stress, while Fuwayrit and Al-Ashat grouped with a lower-cover, stress-tolerant community characteristic of more extreme environments in the southern Gulf. We recommend implementation of a nation-wide baseline assessment of coral communities to guide development of an MPA network and long-term coral monitoring program for Qatar. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Qatar is a 300 km long peninsular nation extending into the southern Arabian Gulf. Coral communities in Qatar were historically among the most widespread in the region, and drew the attention of some of the earliest regional reef science (Kinsman, 1964; Shinn, 1976). Surveys during the 1960s documented widespread fringing assemblages extending over more than 200 km of coastline in northern and northeastern Qatar (Neuman, 1979; Shinn, 1976). These coral communities were heavily dominated by Acropora table corals, and were described as “extensive” and “lush”, with fringing assemblages “…consisting of many miles of Acropora thickets” (Shinn, 1973a, 1976). Aerial photos in the 1960s show expansive Acropora stands with Porites understories growing on the windward margins of shallow rocky platforms throughout the capital city's Doha Bay (Shinn, 1973b). Degradation of Qatar's corals began in the 1960s and accelerated in later decades. The first major impact occurred in 1964 when an unusually cold winter storm resulted in mass coral bleaching throughout Qatar (SST 4 °C in Doha Bay, 14 °C at 17 m; Shinn, 1976). While massive corals were minimally impacted, Acropora suffered heavy mortality and formerly dense thickets were replaced with extensive stands of dead coral across northeastern Qatar (Shinn, 1976). Despite the extent of impacts, juvenile Acropora began recruiting within a year and a half, growing in abundance and size over subsequent years (Shinn, 1976). Unfortunately, this recovery coincided with the onset of large scale

⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.A. Burt).

dredging and industrial expansion at the start of Qatar's oil boom in the early 1970s, and this resulted in substantial degradation of coral communities around the capital city (El-Baz, 1979; Emara et al., 1985). However, extensive Acropora stands with high coral cover continued to dominate coastal areas to the north and southeast of the country through the 1980s (Emara et al., 1985; Sheppard and Sheppard, 1991). Later the 1991 Gulf War oil spill extended as far as Qatar but had minimal impacts, with post-spill surveys showing a number of offshore assemblages containing abundant live coral (60–70% cover) and communities dominated by healthy Acropora thickets and a mixed understory of merulinids (faviids) and large Porites bommies (Fadlallah et al., 1993; Mohammed and Al-Ssadh, 1996). Thus, outside of the major urban and industrial areas Qatar's coral communities were in relatively good condition through the early 1990s. The longest-lasting and largest-scale impacts to corals in Qatar were the result of recurrent bleaching events that occurred in 1996 and 1998, when sea surface temperatures (SSTs) reached 37.7 °C in the southern Gulf, N 2 °C above normal summer maxima (Riegl, 2002; Sheppard and Loughland, 2002). These bleaching events resulted in the near total loss of all coral from shallow (b3 m) habitats in Qatar, with Acropora virtually eliminated from all near-shore coral communities and only remnant patches of Porites and Cyphastrea with b10% live coral cover remaining in most coastal areas (Rezai et al., 2004; Sheppard et al., 2010; Sheppard and Loughland, 2002). The impacts from bleaching were exacerbated by anthropogenic activity, with sedimentation from dredging and pollution from the growing industrial sector impairing recovery (Al-Kuwari and Kaiser, 2011; Richer, 2008). As a result, by the late2000s near-shore coral communities across much of northeastern Qatar were considered functionally extinct (Maghsoudlou et al., 2008).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025 0025-326X/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Burt, J.A., et al., An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025

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Off-shore coral assemblages were also impacted by the 1996/98 bleaching events, but to a lesser extent. Four coral communities N50 km offshore from Doha that were surveyed immediately before the 1998 bleaching event had 30–60% coral cover, with Acropora dominant at all sites (Al-Ansi and Al-Khayat, 1999), suggesting that the earlier 1996 event had relatively limited impacts at these deeper off-shore sites. However, the 1998 event was hotter and longer lasting (Riegl, 2002), resulting in widespread mortality even at these offshore sites (Rezai et al., 2004; Riegl and Purkis, 2009). Surveys in 2004 showed that Acropora had begun recolonizing the off-shore sites of Umm Al-Arshan and Halul island (Abdel-Moati, 2006), but most were juveniles (80% b6.3 cm diameter) and overall coral cover remained depressed (b 10%) (Foster et al., 2013). Extensive nation-wide surveys in 2007/8 found Acropora only at Halul, and several species that had been reported in earlier surveys were no longer observed in Qatar (Sheppard et al., 2010, 2012). The close of the 2000s saw further degradation of the already fragile coral ecosystems in Qatar. Coastal dredging, reclamation, and channelization expanded rapidly, and the cumulative impacts of these projects would have represented a large-scale and long-term stressor for nearshore coral communities (Richer, 2008; Sheppard et al., 2012; van Lavieren et al., 2011). The decade was capped with yet another bleaching event in 2010, pushing many of the already stressed coastal ecosystems over the edge. SSTs reached 37.8 °C in Qatar and bleaching lasted for over six weeks (Al-Ansi, 2010; Riegl et al., 2012), resulting in dramatic declines of even robust massive coral genera that remained in these areas (e.g. two-thirds of Platygyra lost; Riegl et al., 2011, 2012). Although there is a broad awareness that corals have undergone substantial change in recent decades, Qatar's coral communities are the least studied in the region (b3% of Gulf reef research; Burt, 2013) and there have been no recent assessments of the status of coral communities in the nation. This study provides a detailed quantitative assessment of three coral habitats in Qatar, including both near-shore and off-shore sites, in order to assess the current status of these communities. This will provide important baseline information against which future studies can assess trends in the condition of coral communities. Second, the structure of coral communities in Qatar is compared against that of coral assemblages in neighboring Bahrain and the UAE, providing an objective assessment of the status of Qatar's corals relative to the larger context of coral assemblages across the southern Arabian Gulf as a whole. 2. Methods Sampling occurred at three locations in Qatar: Umm Al-Arshan is a seamount (14 m depth) located 42 km offshore from northern Qatar (N 26° 30' 49.8", E 51° 17' 58.4"), Fuwayrit is a shallow (b3 m) nearshore fringing community (b 600 m from shore) located 80 km from Doha in northeastern Qatar (N 26° 01' 42.3", E 51° 23' 09.5"), and AlAshat is an off-shore island (b6 m depth) located 11 km from the southeastern coast, 60 km south of Doha (N 24° 44' 45.7", E 51° 36' 02.8"). Halul island was not included in this study as sampling permits could not be obtained for this high-security area. Coral communities were surveyed using the methods of Burt et al. (2011, 2013) to allow direct comparison of data among sites in the southern Gulf. In brief, coral communities were sampled using 0.25 m2 quadrats photographed at 3 m intervals along six replicate 30 m transects spaced ~ 5 m apart across the coral community, for a total of 66 quadrat images per site. Images were analyzed using CPCe v6 (Kohler and Gill, 2006), with the benthos underlying 50 random points identified to the lowest taxonomic level possible (to species for coral) in each quadrat. For comparison between sites in Qatar, one-way ANOVAs with post-hoc Tukey's tests were used to test for differences in percent cover of benthos (arcsine squareroot transformed) and species richness (log10(n + 1) transformed). In order to put the Qatar coral communities

in the larger context of the southern Arabian Gulf, coral community structure at these sites was compared against those reported earlier for the neighboring nations of Bahrain (Burt et al., 2013) and the UAE (Burt et al., 2011), which were surveyed using identical techniques. Transect data were pooled for each site and compared among 2 sites in Bahrain, 12 sites in the UAE, and the 3 Qatar sites surveyed here. Statistical approaches for the large-scale comparison followed those described above for coral cover and richness. In addition, multivariate community structure was examined. A hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis was performed on the Bray Curtis distance matrices, and a Similarity Profile (SIMPROF) routine used to test for structure in the data (based on 999 permutations) to identify significantly different groupings. Significant coral community groups identified by SIMPROF were then overlaid on a two-dimensional NMS ordination of the same distance matrix to allow visualization of community structure. Coral species characteristic to the distinct community groups and the species driving differences among groups were identified using a Similarity Percentage (SIMPER) routine. All multivariate analyses were performed in Primer-E v7 software, with rare species (occurring in b 5% of samples) excluded to avoid the influence of outliers. 3. Results and discussion Coral communities throughout the southern Arabian Gulf have undergone substantial decline in recent decades as a result of recurrent bleaching events and widespread coastal development (Burt, 2014; Burt et al., 2011, 2013). This study provides a current assessment of coral communities at three sites in Qatar, providing baseline data against which future trends can be assessed, and compares these communities against those in neighboring nations to assess them in the larger regional context. The results show that there has been considerable change in coral abundance and composition relative to historic records, and highlight the need for immediate management intervention to conserve these fragile ecosystems. 3.1. Qatar's coral communities Qatar's coral communities have been understudied relative to all other Gulf countries (Burt, 2013), and limited quantitative information is available on historic coral assemblages at the sites examined here. Umm Al-Arshan has historically been considered an important coral site in Qatar. This offshore seamount is located N 40 km from northern Qatar and is surrounded by deep (N 25 m) water, and this location likely buffers the coral community against many of the stressors affecting corals elsewhere in Qatar. Although the 1996/98 bleaching event decimated corals elsewhere in the nation, effects on Umm Al-Arshan were less extreme and it was considered among the least impacted communities in the country (Abdel-Moati, 2008). By the mid-2000s recovery of Acropora was well underway (Abdel-Moati, 2006; Riegl and Purkis, 2009, 2012), and this site was considered among the most diverse in Qatar (Abdel-Moati, 2006). However, widespread bleaching was observed here in 2010 (Al-Ansi, 2010), and there have been no further records of the coral community at this site in subsequent years. Our results show that Umm Al-Arshan continues to be an important coral habitat in Qatar, but that the coral community remains impaired compared with earlier observations. The benthic community here was dominated by live coral and algae, which together covered over threequarters of the substrate at this site, and dead coral was also relatively common (6% cover) (Fig. 1a). In terms of coral cover, Umm Al-Arshan had the highest coral cover of all sites (22.9%; Fig. 1b), with significantly more coral than Al-Ashat island (ANOVA F(2,15) = 6.1, p b 0.05; Tukey's p b 0.05). This was also the most species rich site, containing 24 of the 26 coral species observed in this study (Supplementary Table 1), and had mean richness that was significantly higher than at all other sites (Fig. 1b; ANOVA F(2) = 289.7, p b 0.001, Tukey's p b 0.001 each). These data are particularly important for adding to the historical

Please cite this article as: Burt, J.A., et al., An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025

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Fig. 1. Structure of benthic communities on Qatar's reefs. (a) Percent cover of major benthic components, (b) Mean (±SE) coral cover (bars) and coral species richness (circles), and (c) relative abundance of major coral families (as percent of coral) at each site in Qatar.

baseline for Umm Al-Arshan, where only 14 species had previously been reported (Abdel-Moati, 2006), and current species richness observed here exceeds that reported for any other sites in Qatar in a 2007 nationwide survey (Sheppard et al., 2012). Although these observations are generally positive, shifts in community structure suggest that this assemblage is still undergoing recovery. While current coral cover at Umm Al-Arshan is the highest observed in this study, and is more than double the cover observed in recent surveys at Halul (9.7%; Foster et al., 2012, 2013), it remains low compared with estimates from this site in the early 1990s (70% cover; Mohammed and Al-Ssadh, 1996). In addition, while this was the only site in the current study that contained live Acropora, its abundance was low (b3% of coral cover, Fig. 1c; Supplementary Table 1), particularly given that this area was Acropora dominated in the early 1990s (Mohammed and Al-Ssadh, 1996). Instead, the assemblage is now dominated by merulinids, which make up nearly two-thirds of coral, with the remainder mainly comprised of poritids, siderastreids, and dendrophyllids (Fig. 1c). Overall, these observations suggest that Umm Al-Arshan is among the most important coral ecosystems in Qatar, but that it is in relatively fragile condition. As such, Umm Al-Arshan should be considered a priority area for conservation. Qatar has made positive efforts to establish 7 marine protected areas (MPAs) that cover 11.6% of their territorial waters, but these have generally focused on near-shore ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrasses, rather than coral habitats (Al-Cibahy et al., 2012; Van Lavieren and Klaus, 2013). Given the ecological importance of this site, extension of protected area status should be considered for Umm Al Arshan.

The near-shore Fuwayrit site contrasted markedly with the off-shore site. Sand and dead coral/rubble covered 80% of the substrate at Fuwayrit, and these were significantly more common here than at other sites (Fig. 1a; F(2,15) = 32.7 and 6.6, p b 0.001, respectively; Tukey's p b 0.01 each). This site contained intermediate coral cover (Fig. 1b; No difference from other sites: ANOVA F(2,15) = 6.1, p N 0.05), but the entire coral community was made up by just two stresstolerant species — the poritid Porites harrisoni and the merulinid Cyphastrea micropthalma (Fig. 1c; Supplementary Table 1) — making this the most species poor site in this study, with significantly lower richness (ANOVA F(2) = 289.7, p b 0.001, Tukey's p b 0.001 each). While no historic data are available for this particular site, our observation that over a third of the substrate at Fuwayrit was occupied by dead coral/rubble, including a considerable amount of eroded coral branches, suggests that this area once contained a high-cover coral community where Acropora was at least present, if not as abundant as commonly described for near-shore communities in northeastern Qatar in the past (Shinn, 1976). The current community type at Fuwayrit is similar to other near-shore assemblages that were described in the years following the 1996/98 bleaching event, where the surviving patches of coral were Porites and Cyphastrea dominated and generally contained b10% coral cover (Pilcher et al., 2000; Rezai et al., 2004; Sheppard and Loughland, 2002). This coral community is now dominated by relatively hardy taxa that are generally characteristic of environments experiencing chronic or recurrent stress (Burt et al., 2011), and the absence of Acropora or any other genera common to Qatar coral assemblages suggest that this community is living at the margins of its

Please cite this article as: Burt, J.A., et al., An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025

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tolerance. Management efforts aimed at reducing additional stress from anthropogenic activities around this and similar near-shore coral environments is warranted. The benthic community at Al-Ashat island in southeastern Qatar was mainly composed of bare rock interspersed with sand (Fig. 1c). This site had the lowest coral cover observed in this study (13%; Fig. 1b), with significantly less coral than was observed at the Umm Al-Arshan seamount (ANOVA F(2,15) = 6.1, p b 0.05, Tukey's p b 0.05). Despite the low coral cover, this site contained an intermediate level of species richness (11 corals; Supplementary Table 1), with richness that was lower than Umm Al-Arshan but greater than at the near-shore Fuwayrit site (Fig. 1b; ANOVA F(2) = 289.7, p b 0.001; Tukey's p b 0.001 each), likely a reflection of its distance from the mainland (N 10 km) and being surrounded by well flushed, deeper (N15 m) water. The coral cover observed here is now half of what was observed just prior to the 1998 bleaching event at the neighboring Hadeed reef (30% cover), when Acropora dominated the coral community (Al-Ansi and Al-Khayat, 1999). Today Acropora are entirely absent from Al-Ashat, while merulinids and poritids co-dominate the community (80% of coral), with the remainder mainly composed of the siderastreid Psammocora stellata (Fig. 1c; Supplementary Table 1). Prior to the 1998 bleaching event, these families has been sub-dominant members of the understory community in this area (Al-Ansi and Al-Khayat, 1999), and their relative dominance in a low cover community today suggests that these families have differentially survived and/or recovered from the recurrent bleaching events that had occurred over the past two decades. 3.2. Qatar in the context of the southern Arabian Gulf While coral communities in Qatar have undergone considerable decline over the past half century, such changes are not isolated. Coral communities throughout the southern Gulf have been subject to similar pressures over the past several decades, with widespread coral bleaching having impacts at basin-wide scales and pressure from coastal development and reclamation having impacts to reefs in more localized areas (Burt, 2014; Burt et al., 2011, 2013, 2014). To put Qatar coral assemblages into a larger biogeographic context, coral cover and richness were compared against 14 sites spanning over 500 km in the southern Arabian Gulf including sites in neighboring Bahrain and the UAE. Our results showed significant differences in both coral cover and mean species richness among locations in the southern Gulf (Fig. 2; Coral: F(16,84) = 35.5, Richness: F(16,84) = 38.0, p b 0.001 each). Coral cover in Qatar was generally reflective of conditions at areas elsewhere in the western portion of the Arabian Gulf. There was only one instance where coral cover in Qatar exceeded that of a neighboring country (Umm Al-Arshan N Fasht Al-Adhm in Bahrain; Tukey's p b 0.05), and in all other cases coral cover at Qatar sites was either comparable to

(p N 0.05) or significantly lower than (p b 0.05) that observed on any of the other 14 sites, indicating that these communities are generally representative of the wider coral ecosystem in this area which have been heavily degraded by common pressures in recent decades. However, in terms of species richness, Qatar's Umm Al-Arshan site was found to have the highest total richness of any of all habitats examined in the southern Gulf (24 species; Fig. 2), with significantly higher mean species richness than all sites in the southern Gulf (Tukey's test: p b 0.01), except Bulthama in Bahrain and Ras Ghanada in the UAE which had lower mean richness but were not statistically distinguishable (p N 0.05). This observation lends further credence to the suggestion that conservation of Umm Al-Arshan is warranted, particularly given that this site lies upstream in the dominant coastal current that runs along the coast of Qatar and the UAE and may potentially serve as a source of larvae seeding coral communities in those areas. In contrast, Fuwayrit was among the most species-poor sites examined. With only two species observed at this near-shore site, it had the lowest total richness observed across the 17 sites (Fig. 2), and mean coral richness was comparable to the several other depauperate sites in western Abu Dhabi (Mukasab to Bu Tinah reef, excluding offshore Delma) as well as the low diversity Fasht Al Adhm in Bahrain (Tukey's test: p N 0.05 each). Each of these other sites were particularly badly affected by the bleaching events in the late 1990's as a result of the more extreme environmental conditions in the western portion of the southern Arabian Gulf (Sheppard and Loughland, 2002), and the few species that remain in these areas today represent the stress-tolerant species that were able to survive the recurrent bleaching events (Burt et al., 2011, 2013). The island of Al-Ashat had an intermediate level of species richness, with significantly higher species richness than the depauperate communities of Fasht Al Adhm (Bahrain) and Fuwayrit (Qatar), and western Abu Dhabi (Mukasab to Bu Tinah) (Tukey's test: p b 0.05), and its richness was comparable to all of the other sites in Bahrain and the UAE (p N 0.05). Although the community at Al-Ashat island is also located in the environmentally extreme southwestern Gulf, it is located N 10 km offshore in an area that is surrounded by deeper water and which experiences relatively good flushing by the eastern Qatar current (Reynolds, 1993), and this likely plays a role in maintaining the moderate richness characteristic of this site (Fig. 2). In terms of multivariate community structure, two distinct coral assemblage-types were identified in the southern Arabian Gulf (Fig. 3; Simprof π = 5.2, p b 0.01), and these groups did segregate by geographic proximity. Qatar's offshore Umm Al-Arshan seamount assemblage was closely associated with the offshore Bulthama site in Bahrain and also grouped with a series of distant near-shore communities spanning from eastern Abu Dhabi to Sharjah in the UAE (Group 1), while Fuwayrit and Al-Ashat clustered with communities in western

Fig. 2. Coral cover and species richness (total per site and mean per transect) on 17 reefs in the southern Arabian Gulf. Sites are arranged from west to east.

Please cite this article as: Burt, J.A., et al., An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025

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Fig. 3. (a) Map of coral reef sites in the southern Arabian Gulf. (b) NMS ordination of coral communities at each site, with gray lines enclosing two distinct communities (see text).

Abu Dhabi and Fasht Al-Adhm in Bahrain (Group 2) (Fig. 3b). These groupings are generally reflective of the extremity of the impacts from earlier bleaching events and chronic environmental stress. Group 2 is characterized by sites that were among the most impacted by bleaching events in the late 1990s (Sheppard and Loughland, 2002), as well as areas where significant bleaching mortality was also observed in 2010 (Riegl et al., 2011; 2012), and they are generally characterized by more extreme salinity and water temperature (Reynolds, 1993). In contrast, the coral communities at sites in Group 1 were generally impacted to a lesser degree by earlier bleaching events (Abdel-Moati, 2008; Burt et al., 2011, 2013; Sheppard and Loughland, 2002), and typically experience less extreme environmental conditions as a result of better exchange with deeper offshore waters (Reynolds, 1993; Riegl, 2002; Riegl and Purkis, 2009). These patterns are reflected in the contributions of species driving differences between these community groups. Simper analyses showed that just six species were responsible for nearly three-

quarters of 70.1% dissimilarity in community structure between these assemblages (Supplementary Table 3), with the highly stress-tolerant P. harrisoni characterizing Group 2 communities, where it was nearly seven times more abundant, while a mixture of various merulinids and poritids were more common to the less impacted/extreme Group 1 reefs (P. daedalea, Porites lutea, C. micropthalma, F. pallida, and Porites lobata, while P. harrisoni; Supplementary Table 3). 3.3. Managing for the future of Qatar's corals The results of this and other studies have shown that coral communities in the southern Arabian Gulf have undergone considerable change in recent decades, and recent global assessments now classify virtually all corals in Qatar as being at risk from the integrated threats of local stressors and climate change (Burke et al., 2011). There is a need for rapid and dramatic management intervention if we are to conserve

Please cite this article as: Burt, J.A., et al., An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025

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the remaining coral ecosystems in the nation, and preserve this important asset for future generations of Qataris. In order to conserve the integrity of the remaining coral communities in Qatar and enhance their recovery into the future, aggressive management and conservation efforts are needed. Currently the capacity to manage coral ecosystems in Qatar systems is limited by a lack of available data on the extent and condition of coral assemblages through the nation. Although there were earlier coral survey efforts to fill in some of these gaps (Abdel-Moati, 2006; EWS-WWF, 2008; Foster et al., 2012; Mohammed and Al-Ssadh, 1996; Sheppard and Loughland, 2002), they often occurred only at isolated locations and were performed before some of the more recent stress events that have impacted these communities. And although this study does provide comprehensive information on the current status of coral communities, the results from these three sites cannot be generalized across the nation. In order to identify key conservation areas and develop a robust baseline against which future trends can be measured, there is a strong need for a comprehensive assessment of the current status of Qatar's coral communities. It is recommended that Qatar perform of a nation-wide baseline assessment in order to establish the location and condition of coral ecosystems across the country. This would benefit from an integrated approach which incorporates large-scale habitat mapping using remote sensing, supported by substantial field-based surveys to characterize the condition and composition of coral communities across a large number of candidate sites. Data resulting from this nation-wide survey would allow for data-driven prioritization of management and conservation efforts across the country. While Umm Al-Arshan was clearly identified as a priority area for conservation in this study, it is likely that similar coral communities occur on other seamounts and offshore islands around northern Qatar. The establishment of a nation-wide survey effort would allow an objective assessment of the condition and vulnerability of coral ecosystems, and the resultant data would be integral to supporting the design of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) network that could best conserve Qatar's coral assets. While Qatar has made great strides in establishing MPAs over the past several decades (Van Lavieren and Klaus, 2013), these have generally focused on coastal ecosystems where corals are rare or absent. A robust baseline assessment would provide the information on the current extent and condition of coral assemblages that is necessary for the development of an effective and sustainable MPA network for Qatar. It is further recommended that this baseline assessment be considered the first stage in a longer-term nation-wide monitoring program. By establishing permanent monitoring stations at a series of highpriority habitats identified in the baseline surveys, marine managers will be able to assess trends in coral community health over time and conduct proactive data-driven management of these ecosystems (Sale et al., 2011), and long-term monitoring will allow an assessment of the effectiveness of MPAs and other management efforts in enhancing coral recovery and conservation over the long term. With the establishment of a national coral baseline survey and monitoring network, Qatar has the opportunity to establish itself as regional leader in using data-driven approaches to guide proactive management of its ecological resources. It is only with such progressive management efforts that we can hope conserve these valuable ecosystems to be enjoyed by future generations of Qataris. Supplementary data to this article can be found online at http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025. Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to ExxonMobil Research Qatar for funding this research through project A15-0186 granted to New York University Abu Dhabi. Support for field work was provided by Creocean. Particular thanks go to Cecile Richard and Edouard Horlin for providing dive

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Please cite this article as: Burt, J.A., et al., An assessment of Qatar's coral communities in a regional context, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.025