ScienceDaily (July 28, 2011) — In the last 30 years, more than 90 percent of the reef-building coral responsible for maintaining major marine habitats and providing a natural barrier against hurricanes in the Caribbean has disappeared because of a disease of unknown origin.
Now a University of Florida geographer and his colleagues applied Geographic Information Systems, known as GIS — as well as software previously used to examine human illness — to show where clusters of diseased coral exist. Their findings, published this month in the journal PLoS One, may help scientists derive better hypotheses to determine what contributes to coral disintegration. Read the full article