Seasonal dynamics of coral reef algae in the southern Red Sea. Functional group and population ecology.

The presence of extreme summer conditions in the southern Red Sea provides a unique opportunity to address questions on the importance of strong seasonality and extreme high temperatures in structuring coral reef communities. The main theme of this thesis is to investigate the effects of the extreme seasonality on reef algal community structure and the dynamics of different algal functional form groups, as well as on the population ecology of dominant species in the shallow reef environment.