Coral Geographic is one of the projects now underway at Coral reef Research which will culminate almost all that is known about the biogeography of reef building stony corals. Much like the Coral ID CD which will be published online in 2010, Coral Geographic will be a free GIS service that will help researchers and coral keepers alike make sense of where corals come from and how different reef ecoregions are formed by their place in the world. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a very powerful mapping technology that is used everyday in navigation software and Coral Geographic will contain a large database of freely downloadable GIS maps that will be loaded with data about weather, ecology, sea surface temperatures and just about anything else you might want to know about where corals grow. Hopefully with these kinds of coral distribution maps widely available to us we’ll stop seeing corals like Acanthatsrea maxima from the Middle East being used to label a wide range of mussids from Australia and the Indo-Pacific.
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