Pleistocene Perspectives on Coral Reef Community Structure

Composition and zonation of coral reef communities are unstableon the scale of human lifetimes, but stable on average overthousands to hundreds of thousands of years. Traditional small-scaleecological studies can miss community patterns which are obscuredby the noise of short-term change. Tests for stability requiremonitoring of populations over many generations—milleniafor long-lived corals and forest trees. The only recourse isthe fossil record.