Fig. 2
Literature base summary. A graphical summary of mesophotic research since 1960. a The number of articles published in a given year. b The number of articles identified as considering ecology, disturbance, trophic interactions, symbionts, and reproduction. Article categories were chosen from a word cloud generated from abstracts, then assigned manually. c The number of articles reporting an upper depth limit for mesophotic reefs. If a range was reported the shallowest value was extracted. d The geographical distribution of research effort on MCEs. The size of the orange circles indicates the number of articles in the region, also displayed in text labels