The importance of sampling design: spatial patterns and clonality in estimating the genetic diversity of coral reefs

Abstract

The interpretation of genetic variation on and among corals on reefs has rarely been contextualized in an explicitly spatial framework where each individual has both genetic and spatial parameters. Here, we explore interactions between sampling effort, sampling design, and the presence of spatial genetic structure (SGS) on the ability to effectively characterize genetic diversity on a coral reef. To do this, we take our dataset of 2352 genotypes (78 unique multi-locus genotypes) of the coral, Pocillopora damicornis, collected from June 2007 to October 2009, a dataset of near-exhaustive sampling of a single patch reef in Kāne‘ohe Bay, Hawai‘i (21°27.462N, 157°48.405W), and subsample from it u..