Facility improvements to establish capacity for coral reef resilience research assessing genetic adaptation and physiological acclimatization

Central Caribbean Marine Institute, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Corals form the architectural framework for tropical reefs, supporting the most productive and biologically diverse marine ecosystems on Earth. Because coral reefs are especially vulnerable, it is important to understand how organisms and populations can respond to ocean warming either through range expansion, physiological acclimatization, or genetic adaptation. At the Central Caribbean Marine Institute in the Cayman Islands, data collected continuously over the last 22 years offers a long-term ecological record of the reefs and provides insight into the recent performance of the local reef ecosystem and impacts of global stress events, such as coral bleaching. This long-term dataset can provide unique insight and evidence of resilience capacity of coral reefs in the region and potentially globally. This award will leverage this research history with infrastructure to study the physiological and molecular mechanisms that drive resilience of coral reef systems. It will provide a much-needed opportunity for scientists to disentangle anthropogenic and climate influences on coral reef evolution, adaption, and resilience at all levels of the ecosystem, from species and community levels to genomic and microbial levels. The new infrastructure consists of an outdoor mesocosm in which environmental parameters can be modified independently for manipulative experiments, and an adjacent molecular laboratory that will enable preservation, extraction and processing of experimental samples. Current research on the mechanisms driving coral reef ecosystem and organismal adaptation and evolution during climate stress and extreme will be advanced by the capacity to experimentally manipulate environmental conditions, such as light and temperature, as well as access to a molecular facility to process and preserve samples for genomic comparisons. Resources that enable manipulative experiments and molecular analyses, will attract visiting researchers to examine questions related to reef resilience and adaptation in collaboration with resident scientists at CCMI. Public outreach and educational programs serving undergraduate and graduate level students will be expanded by the new infrastructure. For more information about CMMI, please visit https://reefresearch.org/. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.