Literature Review

It all started with a crazy idea of wanting to discover what kind of reef ecosystems exist in New Zealand. To do so, the first step was to dive into the literature to see what already existed. To keep from getting too distracted by squirrel articles, I conducted a systematic review of literature using four key terms: (a) Reef diversity; (b) Reef succession; (c) Scleractinia coral; and (d) Biodiversity. I narrowed the parameters of the search to include: (a) the four key terms; (b) publication in a peer reviewed journal; (c) publication between January, 2012 and November, 2017; and (d) accessible through a search of the Evans Library databases at Texas A&M University. The first column in the table below identifies a key term. The second column identifies additional key terms used in conducting the review of literature. The third column contains the article count for each search conducted through the databases at Evans Library. I reviewed the articles that first popped up in multiple key term searches. As the article searches returned less than 40 articles, I started looking at these articles for content. In this initial literature review I found 6 key articles to inform the beginning of this project.