History of Research About the Tropical Brazilian Coral Reef Systems

The history of research about the tropical Brazilian coral reef systems starts with the first foreign visitors to Brazil, in the 1800s and reaches the study of impacts of modern days in the ecosystem. A bibliometric analysis of over 700 articles, obtained in the peer-reviewed literature, offered important references concerning the distribution in time and space of the studied articles. The 1980 decade marks the beginning of the growth of the number of publications, and in the 1990s started the contribution among Brazilians and foreign researchers. This analysis has shown patterns of the morphology and distribution of reefs and that corals and reef fishes are the dominant targets of research. We also describe the main approaches and how they evolved in time, adopting new technologies for reef assessment and for reef mapping. We also show that contributions to management initiatives for minimizing the local and global impacts that are affecting the Brazilian reefs become significant after the decade that began in 2010. Future scope complemented with new approaches such as baseline surveys, integrated research, community involvement, policy, and continued management, will extend our knowledge contributing to compare the Brazilian coral reefs with worldwide counterpart.