About this site
This is a project of the ENEC 259 Coral Reef Ecology and Management at UNC - Chapel Hill (ENEC259) class. It is meant to be a semi-comprehensive resource for learning about corals, coral reefs, the threats corals face, the role and importance reefs play in the world, and management of reefs and reef-related environments. In time, this site has become the class “textbook”, and we hope that other classes interested in learning about coral reefs might also find it useful and informative.
Each year’s ENEC259 class will build upon the material from previous years. Students will select topics of interest from a list of topics provided by previous years’ students that require more research, or students can introduce new topics. After a semester of research, current students will synthesize their research and add that content to this site, including adding additional instructional material like Powerpoint slides and handouts.
Tips for Using This Site
If you are looking for something specific, like information on coral bleaching, use the Search box at the top and type in “bleaching” If you want to learn more about a given topic, then start with the Main Topics, and work your way down towards more specific topics
A note about references: we migrated this cite from Mediawiki to markdown to simplify the hosting. One of the downsides is that we lost some formatting and the ability to link to sections within pages. All of the references were linked by numbers to the references section at the bottom in Mediawiki, and the conversion process faithfully recreated the linking but lost the anchor that it was supposed to link to. As a result, if you click on a reference like [1], it won’t take you to the bottom of the page where the reference is.
About Our Images
Unless otherwise indicated, photos shown on this site are pulled from our class photo albums stored using Google Photos, and image credits are attributed in the photo album. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos are from the US Virgin Islands (the vast majority from St. John), the British Virgin Islands (the Caves of Normal Island or the Indians), or from San Salvador island in the Bahamas.
Contact
If you have any questions about this site or topics you’d like to see added, please email Brian Naess at naess@unc.edu.