Scaling-up restorative assisted evolution on Anthropocene coral reefs

NERC : Liam Lachs : NE/S007512/1

Coral reefs face unprecedented declines and ecological changes worldwide due to the impact of humans. This is particularly worrying as coral reefs support fisheries and tourism livelihoods, they act as a coastal protection from storms, and also harbour unique biodiversity. Even when local disturbances like fishing or nutrient enrichment are banned, mass coral bleaching events have still occurred on a global scale. This is caused by severe marine heatwaves. As the oceans heat up due to climate change, marine heatwaves become ever more frequent and last for longer periods. Without action, the socio-ecological services provided by coral reefs may be lost within 3-5 decades due to climate change.

Unfortunately, the global reduction in carbon emissions needed to slow the greenhouse effect and mitigate these ecological impacts is going to be very difficult to achieve under current agreements like the Paris Agreement. Therefore, it is now critical to consider how active management interventions can be used to support the resilience of coral reefs in the future. CORALASSIST, our lab group in Newcastle University, United Kingdom, is working on this topic. We are testing coral restoration techniques combined with selective breeding using naturally heat tolerant corals. We are gaining new insights on the physiological and genomic basis for heat tolerance in individual corals, but how can this benefit an entire coral reef ecosystem?

The proposed collaboration with the Climate and Coastal Ecosystem Laboratory (CCEL), University of British Columbia, Canada, will aim to answer this question. CCEL are a group of global climate modelling and coral experts, an area that is lacking from our UK research group. This collaboration will integrate the individual-level scientific knowledge from CORALASSIST into larger spatial population modelling frameworks.
We will use a suite of global climate projections from climate modelling centres across the world (IPCC), combined with historical temperature data and CORALASSIST data, to do 3 main tasks.
1) We will develop a downscaled sea surface temperature (SST) projection for Palau, Micronesia, Pacific Ocean.
2) We will use this SST projection to understand the future trajectory of Palauan coral reefs under different climate scenarios.
3) We will simulate coral restoration efforts in order to provide useful advice to coral reef managers, such as "how soon and how many heat-tolerant corals are needed to benefit coral reef ecosystems in the long-term".

In addition to this, we will conduct 2 short visits to disseminate our research to the wider scientific community, but also to gain valuable ideas from other scientists. The Baum Lab in University of Victoria will give an entire ecosystem view of modelling, whilst the Bay Lab in University of California Davis will provide expert knowledge on integrating genetic data into coral population adaptation models.