Coral Health Map

Despite the coral biology field growing ever larger, we still have a poor handle on where Earth’s least and most resilient coral reefs are. We normally stumble upon these by accident. Given the low percentage of reefs that have even been surveyed, we need a faster way to identify resilient reefs, one that will yield health-informing data on a timescale that permits management intervention (“coral rescue”). We can’t sample every coral and survey every reef, so I’ve turned to modeling to address this issue.

Over the years, I have been slowly but surely amassing a massive dataset that features abiotic (namely seawater quality), ecological (namely benthic and fish biomass data), and physiological data from framework-building scleractinians at diverse locations in the Caribbean, Atlantic Ocean, and Indo-Pacific (with data from reefs of Eastern Africa and the Middle East ideally incorporated in the not-too-distant future).

The idea is basically to integrate data across biological and oceanographic skills to build predictive models that will demarcate 1) current coral stress loads and 2) future resilience to climate change and other stressors. As such, this project is tightly linked with many others listed to the left, namely the “machine learning & coral health project,” which is currently focused more on the physiological responses of the corals themselves but will later be expanded to incorporate abiotic and ecological parameters. These models will tell us WHERE-with respect to geographic location and speaking to the preferred environmental conditions- the most stress-sensitive corals will be found, as where we are likely to uncover those resilient ones that might make the most sense to use in restoration initiatives.

This work will involve a close collaboration with the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, who has developed the current best (most detailed & comprehensive) map of a large number of the planet’s coral reefs.