From Discovery to Monitoring: Diversity, Evolution, and Ecology of Coral Reef Organisms in the World’s Hottest Seas

Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, yet they are increasingly threatened by rising sea temperatures, marine heatwaves, and climate-driven pressures. The seas around the Arabian Peninsula in particular host some of the hottest, most extreme reef environments known, where corals and other cnidarians already persist at or near their upper thermal limits. These systems act as natural laboratories for understanding how reef organisms cope with conditions that other regions are only beginning to face. Yet large portions of the region’s marine biodiversity remain undescribed or taxonomically unresolved, including cryptic and understudied lineages, limiting our ability to track how known diversity is challenged by increasing pressures. Understanding how biodiversity has evolved, diversified, and functions in these region is essential not only for baseline documentation and assessments, but also for anticipating how it will respond to continued climate pressures. Advances in genomic, ecological, and monitoring methods increasingly allow researchers to narrow this gap, from describing new diversity to monitoring the known one over time.

Researchers across disciplines, including evolutionary biology, ecology, taxonomy, and conservation genetics, have made significant advances in studying coral reef organisms, and we hope to bring these approaches into a closer link with one another. The aim of this Research Topic is to highlight recent advances in our understanding of the diversity, evolution, and ecology of reef organisms in the Arabian Peninsula's extreme seas, and to connect discovery-focused research with the tools needed to monitor reef biodiversity under climate pressures.

We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Methods, and Perspective articles addressing the diversity, evolution, ecology, and monitoring of reef organisms. Studies on reef-associated taxa are also welcome. We encourage topics including but not limited to:
- Discovery and description of new or cryptic reef diversity
- Phylogenetics and phylogenomics of reef organisms
- Adaptive and evolutionary processes, including host-symbiont interactions and evolution
- Population genetics and connectivity
- Ecological monitoring of reef communities under climate stress
- Genomic and molecular tools for biodiversity monitoring
- Conservation genetics and management applications