Roundtable Discussion Groups Summary Papers: Environmental Bio-Indicators in Coral Reef Ecosystems: The Need to Align Research, Monitoring, and Environmental Regulation

Abstract

Editors' Note: At the 14th International Conference on Environmental Bioindicators (14th ICEBI) held in Linthicum Heights, Maryland, USA on 24–26 April 2006, the Conference Chairs and Program Committee initiated the Roundtable Discussion Groups as a regular feature of this and future conferences. The Discussions are designed to generate focused debate around key topic areas, led by academic, government and industry experts, and are structured to produce definitive papers for peer review and publication in EBI's first-quarter issue of each publication year, albeit this year the papers will be published over the first two issues of 2007. The three Roundtables of the 14th ICEBI posed questions revolving around the chosen topic areas of Mercury Bioindicators, Marine Ecosystem-level Indicators, and Regulatory and Policy Uses of Bioindicators, and moved from “what we know” to “where we need to go” and “what are the policy implications from our discussions and conclusions.” The following paper on coral reef indi...