Owing to their calcareous (calcium carbonate) skeletons, scleractinian corals are well known as “stony corals”. They have been major reef-builders since the Triassic and became dominant after the Cretaceous. Nowadays, coral reefs are of economic importance as a source for food and as recreational attraction. Corals are important to other reef species that use them as food, shelter and substrate. Due to their attractive shape and colours, corals are harvested for the aquarium trade. They are popular research objects for many marine scientists. Hence, scleractinian corals have essential ecological, economic and scientific roles. Thus, there is a need for detailed overview of their names and classification. This overview has become available through the Word list of Scleractinia.
This section of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) presents a continuously updated overview of scientific names and classifications of stony corals belonging to the order Scleractinia. This list started with overviews presented by Van der Land (1994) and Cairns et al. (1999, 2001). It was partly revised by Cairns (2009) for azooxanthellate species, which is periodically updated at: www.lophelia.org/coldwatercoralsbook. Taxa have been entered in the WoRMS database since 2007, for which the online Aphia platform of the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) is used. Details on the history of WoRMS are presented by Appeltans et al. (2008, 2011), Costello et al. (2013) Horton et al. (2017), and Vandepitte et al. (2015, 2018). Through WoRMS, the contents of World list of Scleractinia is also updated in the Catalogue of Life (CoL)
A separate portal for the World list of Scleractinia has been introduced in 2018 to increase the list's recognition and visibility. It is aimed to present names that result from a science-based taxonomy, in which morphological and molecular criteria are used (Kitahara et al. 2016). In the last decade, various phylogeny reconstructions of scleractinian families and genera were published; for example on Acropora and Isopora (Wallace et al. 2007), Psammocoridae (Benzoni et al. 2010), Fungiidae (Gittenberger et al. 2011; Benzoni et al. 2012, Oku et al. 2017), Agariciidae (Kitahara et al. 2012), Deltocyathiidae (Kitahara et al. 2013), Dendrophylliidae (Arrigoni et al. 2014a), Lobophylliidae (Arrigoni et al. 2014b; Huang et al. 2016), Merulinidae (Huang et al. 2014), Pocilloporidae (Schmidt-Roach et al. 2014), and Poritidae (Kitano et al. 2014). Application of these phylogenetic models to taxonomic revisions resulted in new classifications, in which taxa moved from one genus or family to another one, usually forming new combination names.