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Turbinaria reniformis

Overview
Conservation Attention
Threats

About

Turbinaria reniformis is a key reef building coral, providing habitat for other reef inhabitants.

Like many EDGE coral species, there is no specific population information about this species and it is believed to be declining due to loss of habitat, climate change, coral bleaching and disease.

As a zooxanthellate species, this coral obtains a portion of its energy requirements from a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthetic algae (zooxanthellae) however due to its preference for coastal turbid waters this species relies more heavily on direct feeding, catching prey with fleshy tentacles.

Order: Scleractinia
Family: Dendrophylliidae
Trend: unknown
Depth Range (m): 2 - 15

EDGE Score

EDGE Score: 4.23 (?)

ED Score: 16.15 (?)

GE / IUCN Red List (?)

Distribution

This coral is widespread but rare, being found across the Indo-West Pacific, from the Red Sea and northern Indian Ocean to Australia, the Philippines and the south China Sea.

Habitat and Ecology

It may form large stands in turbid water but is known to grow into large plates with a diameter of over 1m.

Turbinaria reniformis, like other members of its genus, develops large and structurally complex colonies that provide a significant proportion of the benthic cover in reef habitats. As such, the species is considered of high ecological importance due to the number of species which extract some benefit from the various microhabitats and refuges that result from this species growth.

Find out more

IUCN Red List

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Conservation Actions

For each key category of conservation action, we calculated a conservation attention score based on expert information. In this graph, a higher score means the action is being carried out more intensively over more of the species range. The colour shows how important each action is considered to be for the conservation of this species.

Engaging stakeholders	19
Addressing threats	44
Status of knowledge	22
Management plan	0
Capacity building	0
Behaviour change	0
Awareness raising	11
Funding	0
Legislation	67
	0 20 40 60 80 100
	Score: 100 means the activity occurs at high level across more than 75% of the species range
	Priority: High Medium Low Very Low

Overall Conservation Attention

We combined all of the expert information on conservation actions to calculate an overall conservation attention score for this species. Please help us to reach our goal of establishing dedicated conservation attention at “High” levels for all EDGE species.

Very Low Low Medium High

18%

More information

Recent studies have grouped all possible conservation activities for any species into nine key categories (Washington et. al 2015). For each action, we asked experts for each species to assess the extent to which that action is being carried out and how much of the species’ range that action occurs in. For each action we used these two pieces of information to calculate the conservation attention score per action. A score of 100 means that the action is being carried out to a high level across at least 75% of the species range. We then combined the scores for all actions into an overall conservation attention score for the species. The experts also judged how important each category was to the conservation of that particular species.

This wordcloud illustrates the threats facing this species. The size of each word indicates the extent of a species range that is affected by that threat (larger size means a greater area is affected). The colour of the word indicates how much that threat impacts the species (darker shades of red mean the threat is more severe).