Again in collaboration with Geoff Jones, I continued to develop the theme of disturbance, habitat structure, and the central role that scale plays in mediating their roles in structuring communities during my PhD research on reef fishes in the warm, clear, tropical waters of Lizard Island . I was awarded my PhD with distinction in 1998. I continue to expand my personal research program on linking scales of pattern and process in reef ecology. Habitat structure mediates many ecological processes in reef fish communities, and so I have focused on the response of fishes to habitat heterogeneity as a means of empirically generating scaling rules . This has led to two lines of investigation.
Soft corals exert no direct effect on coral reef fish assemblages.
Disturbance, habitat structure, and the dynamics of a coral reef fish community. Scale of disturbance and the structure of a temperate fish guild. Disturbance and the structure of coral reef fish communities on the reef slope. Disturbance, habitat structure and the ecology of fishes on coral reefs. Multi-scale analysis of habitat association in a guild of blennioid fishes.