Field Identification Guide to the Corals of the Banda Islands, Indonesia

Coral identification is not easy, and most importantly not as straight forward as most of us would wish. On top of that, corals are undergoing major taxonomic revision, currently. This guide’s purpose is not to present a naming convention, but to assist people in Indonesia who are keen to discover the world of corals, in naming what they see. This guide has its roots in COSMARINDO (the Coral Spawning Monitoring and Awareness for Restoration Network Indonesia), a CORDAP (Coral Research & Development Accelerator Platform) funded program that connects scientists, students, and coral enthusiasts across Indonesia to conduct standardized and sustainable coral spawning monitoring and promote science-based non-invasive restoration techniques. The prerequisite of studying coral spawning is to have at least an idea of what genus or species one is looking at. COSMARINDO strongly opposes breaking coral fragments for gamete inspection or species identification. As a training program designed to educate future facilitators, the methods it teaches are likely to be passed down and practiced by generations of students across the country. This comes along with the highest level of responsibility for reef-friendly practices. Accordingly, we provide a guide for coral identification based on in situ photography. Despite its limitations, the use of relatively affordable underwater cameras with adequate macro functionality has proven effective for identifying a wide range of species. With this guide we aim to provide a reference for those who are monitoring coral spawning and are trying to understand which genera or species they observe. We chose to publish this guide at this time - even though major revisions, particularly for Acropora species, are expected soon - because there is an immediate need for an identification resource focused on Indonesian corals. This is especially important as groups across the country, from Banda Aceh in the west to Raja Ampat in the east, have begun monitoring coral spawning. We have indicated those species that are currently undergoing revision throughout the guide. We also base this decision on the understanding that learning to recognize corals is the more challenging task, while applying updated names in the future is considerably easier. The current version of the guide will help to track back how species were named during COSMARINDO. Future name changes will be published in later versions of this guide and will allow tracking and - if necessary - renaming species in past spawning observations. This will be simplified by the fact that coral spawning data is collected in the Indonesia-wide freely accessible database CORALog, where both species names and dates when observations were added are traceable.