The MacKinnon Lists Technique: An efficient new method for rapidly assessing biodiversity and species abundance ranks in the marine environment

provided agreement on 10 out of 10. Species ranks within the lists were also very similar, with an average difference of one rank or less between the methods in each of Deep Fished, Shallow Fished, Deep ROA and Shallow ROA. The mean relative abundance of four species targeted for fishing was calculated per habitat for both methods. Again, the methods identified very similar patterns of species abundance across different habitats (Fig 2). Table 3. Diversity and evenness indices for MaxN and MLT. Fishers alpha index, Brillouin Diversity, Brillouin Evenness and PilousJ evenness for community diversity and evenness were obtained from Diversity 4 for both techniques including Jacknife Standard Error across the four habitats. Habitat type Fishers alpha (+- Jacknife SE) Brillouin Diversity (+- Jacknife SE) Brillouin Evenness (+- Jacknife SE) PielouJ Evenness (+- Jacknife SE) Max N Deep Fished 16.19 (2.45) 3.10 (0.16) 0.81 (0.03) 0.80 (0.04) Shallow Fished 15.19 (1.77) 3.00 (0.15) 0.77 (0.06) 0.77 (0.04) Deep ROA 12.42 (3.77) 2.19 (0.25) 0.70 (0.12) 0.69 (0.08) Shallow ROA 12.50 (2.38) 2.16 (0.20) 0.60 (0.05) 0.60 (0.05) MLT Deep Fished 17.35 (1.79) 3.13 (0.09) 0.82 (0.02) 0.81 (0.02) Shallow Fished 15.83 (2.09) 2.96 (0.18) 0.76 (0.05) 0.76 (0.05) Deep ROA 12.70 (1.87) 2.16 (0.38) 0.69 (0.16) 0.68 (0.13) ShallowROA 12.74 (2.63) 2.18 (0.41) 0.61 (0.12) 0.61 (0.12) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231820.t003

Table 4. Most abundant species in the four coral reef fish communities according to MaxN and MacKinnon Lists Technique. The rank of the top ten species is indi- cated in brackets. MaxN MLT MaxN MLT MaxN MLT MaxN MLT Deep Fished Deep Fished Shallow Fished Shallow Fished Deep ROA Deep ROA ShallowROA ShallowROA Chaetodon assarius 23 (8) 20 (8) 0 0 0 0 0 0 Chaetodon lunula 0 0 0 0 3 (9) 4 11 (8) 6 (9) Chaetodon plebeius 0 0 0 0 3 (10) 2 (9) 0 0 Chlorurus sordidus 0 0 69 (2) 58 (2) 5 (7) 5 (6) 13 (6) 13 (5) Choerodon rubescens 39 (4) 30 (3) 18 (9) 16 (10) 7 (4) 6 (5) 12 (7) 12 (6) Chromis westaustralis 23 (7) 23 (5) 137 (1) 134 (1) 64 (1) 63(1) 218 (1) 203 (1) Coris auricularis 37 (5) 22 (6) 38 (5) 24(8) 0 0 0 0 Dascyllus trimaculatus 0 0 28 (8) 26 (7) 0 0 0 0 Gymnothorax woodwardi 0 0 8 15 (9) 4 (8) 4 (7) 0 0 Kyphosus cornelii 0 0 0 0 0 0 42 (2) 43 (2) Lethrinus nebulosus 0 0 0 0 6 (6) 3 (8) 17 (4) 17 (4) Pagrus auratus 67 (2) 26 (4) 0 0 7 (5) 7 (4) 0 0 Parupeneus spilurus 20 (9) 18 0 0 0 0 0 0 Pentapodus nagasakiensis 16 16 (10) 0 0 0 0 0 0 Plectropomus leopardus 46 (3) 42 (2) 30 (7) 30 (4) 12 (2) 11 (2) 9 (9) 12 (8) Pseudocaranx spp 68 (1) 62 (1) 56 (3) 56 (3) 0 0 0 0 Scarus ghobban 20 (10) 18 (9) 0 0 0 0 0 0 Scarus schlegeli 27 (6) 21 (7) 33 (6) 26 (6) 0 0 7 (10) 6 (10) Scombridae spp 0 0 0 0 9 (3) 8 (3) 19 (3) 19 (3) Stethojulis strigiventer 0 0 0 0 2 2 (10) 0 0

Thalassoma lunare 0 0 42 (4) 29 (5) 0 0 16 (5) 10 (7) Thalassoma lutescens 0 0 17 (10) 16 0 0 0 0 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231820.t004 PLOS ONE A new method for monitoring marine biodiversity PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231820 April 22, 2020 8 / 15