Coral restoration is a widely used practice across the globe to combat the severe declines in coral cover, yet only few studies have observed the responses of fish communities to restoration efforts. This is unfortunate considering the many reef functions that are driven by reef fish communities, making them key indicators of coral ecosystem health. This work investigated how taxonomic and functional diversities of coral reef fishes change over the first two months following outplanting with A. cervicornis. By comparing outplanting with control sites, we found that taxonomic diversity increased over time. Functional diversity, however, remained stable, with species community structures at the outplanting and control sites differing slightly but showing similar combinations of trait values and thus high functional overlaps. High functional overlaps were also observed between the first month after outplanting and the successive month, suggesting little functional shifts within fish communities over the sampling period. Overall, our results were very complex with some inconsistencies between different diversity approaches. However, our results are based on small data sets and might become more conclusive with higher sampling efforts over longer sampling courses. Nevertheless, restoration showed positive effects on species richness and abundance-dominated entropies, suggesting promising results in future research.
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