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A key question in ecology is how biological traits of species determine their locations within an ecosystem. Identifying associations between species traits and environmental variables can help us to understand the causes of disturbance and predict whether species with given traits will persist under changing environmental conditions. To this end corals and environmental variables were sampled in 20 patch reefs of Pulau Seribu, located to the northwest of Jakarta, Indonesia. RLQ analysis, a multivariate ordination approach was subsequently used to relate species traits (colony shape, colony form, corallite size, reproductive mode and adaptive strategy) to environmental variables (e.g., heavy metal concentration in seawater and sediment, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and the cover of sand, dead coral, algae, sponges and soft corals). Using RLQ analysis, we identified environmental gradients associated with …