Coral recruitment represents a key element for coral reef persistence and resilience in the face of environmental disturbances. Studying coral recruitment patterns is fundamental for assessing reef health and implementing appropriate management strategies in an era of climate change. The FluorIS system has been developed to acquire high resolution, wide field-of-view (FOV) in situ images of coral recruits fluorescence and has proven successful in shallow reef environments. However, up to now, its applicability to mesophotic coral ecosystems remains unknown due to the complexity of the system and the limited time available when working at mesophotic depth. In this study we optimized the FluorIS system by utilizing a single infrared-converted camera instead of the bulkier regular dual-camera system, substantially reducing the system complexity and significantly decreasing the acquisition time to an average of 10 seconds for a set of 3 images. Moreover, the speed-FluorIS system is much more economical, decreasing the cost of the full set-up by roughly 40% compared to the original dual-camera system. We tested the utility of the speed-FluorIS by surveying coral recruits across shallow and mesophotic reefs of the Red Sea (Gulf of Eilat) and Bermuda, two of the most northerly reefs in the world with markedly different substrate and topography, and demonstrate that the modified system enables fast imaging of fluorescence to study coral recruitment patterns over a broader range of depths and reef topographies than previous fluorescence methods. Our single-camera system represents a valuable, non-invasive and rapid underwater tool which will help standardize surveys and long-term monitoring of coral recruits, contributing to our understanding of these vital and delicate early life stages of corals.

中文翻译：

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使用优化的荧光成像系统原位估计从浅层到中光珊瑚礁的珊瑚补充模式

珊瑚补充是珊瑚礁在面临环境干扰时的持久性和恢复力的关键因素。研究珊瑚补充模式对于评估珊瑚礁健康和在气候变化时代实施适当的管理策略至关重要。FluorIS 系统已开发用于获取珊瑚新兵荧光的高分辨率、宽视场 (FOV) 原位图像，并已证明在浅礁环境中是成功的。然而，到目前为止，由于系统的复杂性和在中光深度工作时可用的时间有限，它对中光珊瑚生态系统的适用性仍然未知。在这项研究中，我们通过使用单个红外转换相机而不是笨重的常规双相机系统来优化 FluorIS 系统，显着降低了系统复杂性，并将一组 3 个图像的采集时间显着减少到平均 10 秒。此外，speed-FluorIS 系统更加经济，与原始双摄像头系统相比，整个设置的成本降低了大约 40%。我们通过对红海（埃拉特湾）和百慕大这两个世界最北端的珊瑚礁的浅层和中光珊瑚礁进行调查，测试了 speed-FluorIS 的效用，并证明了改进后的系统能够实现荧光的快速成像，以研究比以前的荧光方法更广泛的深度和珊瑚礁地形范围内的珊瑚招募模式。我们的单摄像头系统代表了一种有价值的、