Professor Sean Connolly

Contact Details

Campus:	Townsville
Phone:	+61 7 4781 4242
Fax:	+61 7 4725 1570
Email:	sean.connolly@jcu.edu.au

Research Interests

• Macroecology

• Marine Community Ecology

• Theoretical & Statistical Modelling

• Population Dynamics

• Physiological Ecology and Energetics of Reef Corals

Recent and Current Projects Include

My research group uses a combination of mathematical modelling and empirical work, to address fundamental questions about the origin and maintenance of biodiversity, and also to understand the ecological impacts of environmental changes caused by human activity, such as overfishing and climate change. Mostly, but not exclusively, we use coral reefs as a study system.

Our ongoing work spans a broad range of processes and scales, from the determinants of global-scale patterns in species richness to the energetics of individual organisms. Key research areas include:

• Species Richness Gradients on Coral Reefs.—We are investigating the effects of historical and contemporary environmental factors on coral reef biodiversity. Increasingly, we are moving beyond traditional randomization and correlative approaches that focus only on patterns in species richness, and towards approaches that allow testing of multiple predictions – not only species richness, but the full distribution of species range sizes and locations that give rise to those predictions. A key part of this is building hypothesized mechanisms into process-based models in which species ranges arise dynamically in response to the geographical distribution of environmental conditions (habitat availability, temperature, etc.).

• Commonness, Rarity, and Biodiversity on Coral Reefs.—We are using patterns of species richness and relative abundance in coral reef assemblages to test a variety of general models of community dynamics suitable for high-diversity assemblages like coral reefs. Most previous tests of biodiversity theory have focused on a single prediction (for instance, the species-abundance distribution at the level of individual sites), which is problematic because very different mechanistic assumptions often lead to similar or even identical predictions. To overcome this, we are exploring analytical approximations that identify shared predictions of models that make similar core assumptions about mechanism, and exploiting hierarchically-structured empirical data sets to test multiple predictions of biodiversity simultaneously. This gives us much greater power to distinguish between competing explanations.

• Community ecology.—We address a broad range of questions in community ecology. Current projects include the interactive effects of heterospecific aggression and dietary specialization on community structure in butterflyfishes, the relationship between biodiversity and the temporal stability of ecosystem functioning, dispersal-mediated mechanisms of species coexistence, effects of habitat engineering by damselfishes on benthic community structure and dynamics, and the role of demographic tradeoffs in the coexistence of reef coral species.

• Population Dynamics, Marine Protected Areas, and Extinction Risk on Coral Reefs.—Coral reef fisheries provide sustenance and income to millions of people worldwide. Increasing human population size, and the globalisation of fish markets, are increasing the pressure on many coral reef species, including those that are directly targeted or indirectly affected by fishing activities. We are using population models to investigate a variety of questions related to the viability of coral reef species subject to fishing pressure. Key recent and ongoing topics include robust estimation of population viability in coral reef shark populations, and determining the effects of no-take marine reserves on sustainable yields of reef fish species.

• Physiological Ecology of Reef Corals.—Physical environmental conditions influence population and community dynamics mainly through their effects on the physiology of individual organisms –by influencing their acquisition and expenditure of energy, and their responses to encounters with symbionts, competitors, prey, predators, and pathogens. Our work in this area focuses on going beyond simple “canned” analyses of laboratory experiments that examine individual colony responses to environmental stress, to the calibration of population-dynamic models that allow us to understand how environmental variables like light, temperature, and ocean acidity influence the energy budgets of coral colonies, and consequently their lifetime growth, survival, and reproductive output. By linking coral demography to calibrated responses of organisms to environmental conditions, we are in a much better position to anticipate likely responses to environmental changes, such as increases in coastal runoff, temperature, and ocean acidification.

Recent and Currently Supervised Projects

• Disentangling the drivers of species richness gradients: a process-based approach

• Dispersal and connectivity in scleractinian corals under a changing climate

• Dispersal-mediated coexistence in metacommunities

• Biodiversity and stability in model and coral-reef ecosystems

• Energetics of scleractinian coral larvae and implications for dispersal

• Competition and coexistence in butterflyfish communities

• Flow-mediated effects of ocean acidification on reef corals

• The role of territorial grazers in coral reef trophodynamics

• Connecting marine reserves and metapopulations

• Multiple stressors and the spatial resilience of coral reefs

Future PhD Directions

I develop PhD projects collaboratively with students. Most students in my research group combine empirical work with theoretical or statistical modelling. Broadly, any topic that addresses some sort of question related to biological turnover is potentially of interest to me (energetics, population dynamics, species interactions, large-scale patterns of biodiversity and community structure, and even macroevolutionary dynamics). These include conservation-related topics such as population viability, marine reserves, habitat fragmentation, and coral bleaching. Current areas of particular focus are species richness gradients; biodiversity maintenance in species-rich communities; and energetics & population dynamics of reef corals. Prospective students should visit the Ecological Modelling Research Group website (see link below).

Teaching

MB3260/MB5260 Ecological Dynamics: An Introduction to Modelling

MB3269 Ecological Dynamics: An Introduction to Modelling (Advanced)

MB5340 Ecological Dynamics: Modelling with Data

Other Links

Ecological Modelling Research Group: http://www.jcu.edu.au/ecologicalmodelling/

ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies researcher website:

http://www.coralcoe.org.au/research/seanconnolly.html

Selected Publications

Note: For work led by students in my group, the student’s name is in italics

For a full list of publications, see: https://eprints.jcu.edu.au/view/jcu/40DC68B7FCC23CA52AE79951D224813E.html

Thibaut, L.M., S.R. Connolly, and H.P.A. Sweatman. 2012. Diversity and stability of herbivorous fishes on coral reefs. Ecology 93: 891-901.

Chan, N.C.S., S.R. Connolly, and B.D. Mapstone. 2012. Effects of sex change on the implications of marine reserves for fisheries. Ecological Applications 22: 778-791.

Blowes, S.A. and S.R. Connolly. 2012. Risk-spreading, connectivity, and optimal reserve spacing. Ecological Applications 22: 311-321.

Pandolfi, J.M., S.R. Connolly, D.J. Marshall, and A.L. Cohen. 2011. Projecting coral reef futures under global warming and ocean acidification. Science 333: 418-422.

Karlson, R.H., S.R. Connolly, and T.P. Hughes. 2011. Spatial variance in abundance and occupancy of corals across broad geographical scales. Ecology 92: 1282-1291.

Connolly, S.R. and M. Dornelas. 2011. Fitting and empirical evaluation of models for species abundance distributions. In Magurran, A.E. and B. McGill, editors. Biological diversity: frontiers in measurement and assessment. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Connolly, S.R. and A.H. Baird. 2010. Estimating dispersal potential for marine larvae: dynamic models applied to scleractinian corals. Ecology 91: 3572-3583.

Salomon, Y., S.R. Connolly, and L. Bode. 2010. Effects of asymmetric dispersal on the coexistence of competing species. Ecology Letters 13: 432–441.

Connolly, S. R. 2009. Macroecological theory and the analysis of species richness gradients. Pages 279-309 in Witman, J. and K. Roy, editors. Marine Macroecology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA

Gotelli, N.J., M.J. Anderson, H.T. Arita, A. Chao, R. K. Colwell, S. R. Connolly, D.J. Currie, R.R. Dunn, G.R. Graves, J.L. Green, J.-A. Grytnes, Y.-H. Jiang, W. Jetz, S.K. Lyons, C.M. McCain, A.E. Magurran, C. Rahbek, T.F.L.V.B. Rangel, J. Soberón, C.O. Webb, M.R. Willig. 2009. Patterns and causes of species richness: a general simulation model for macroecology. Ecology Letters, 12: 873–886.

Connolly, S. R., M. Dornelas, D. R. Bellwood, and T. P. Hughes. 2009. Testing species-abundance models: a new bootstrap approach applied to Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Ecology 90: 3138-3149.

Hoogenboom, M. O., and S. R Connolly. 2009. Defining fundamental niche dimensions of corals: synergistic effects of colony size, light and flow. Ecology 90: 767-780.

Belmaker, J., Y. Ziv, N. Shashar, and S. R. Connolly. 2008. Regional variation in the hierarchical partitioning of alpha and beta diversity in coral-dwelling fishes. Ecology 89: 2829-2840.

Dornelas, M., and S. R. Connolly. 2008. Multiple modes in a coral species abundance distribution. Ecology Letters 11: 1008–1016.

Madin, J. S. and S. R. Connolly. 2006. Ecological consequences of major hydrodynamic disturbances on coral reefs. Nature 444: 477-480.

Dornelas, M., S. R. Connolly, and T. P. Hughes. 2006. Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity. Nature 440: 80-82.

Robbins, W., M. Hisano, S. R. Connolly, and J. H. Choat. 2006. Ongoing collapse of coral reef shark populations. Current Biology 16: 2314-2319.

Connolly, S. R., T. P. Hughes, D. R. Bellwood, and R. H. Karlson. 2005. Community structure of corals and reef fishes at multiple scales. Science 309: 1363-1365.

Bellwood, D.R., T.P. Hughes, S.R. Connolly, and J. Tanner. 2005. Environmental and geometric constraints on Indo-Pacific coral reef biodiversity. Ecology Letters 8: 643-651.