Matthew Johnson

2018

2019

2020

In recent years, coral propagation and reef restoration have reached ecologically meaningful scales, with 10,000s of nursery-grown staghorn corals being outplanted onto Florida reefs annually. While these propagation and restoration successes have been considerable, outplanted corals still face environmental challenges that need to be addressed through continued restoration and research. South Florida has experienced three major temperature anomalies in the last few years, including the 2010 cold snap (Lirman et al. 2011) and the back-to-back warm temperature bleaching events of 2014-2015. These events caused mortality of both restored and wild coral populations, and highlighted the need to build the resilience of depleted coral populations to future disturbance, especially within the context of climate change scenarios that predict increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events. Testing methods that have the potential to increase the thermal tolerance of Florida's restored coral populations is therefore a major goal, with potential applicability to other coral restoration efforts being undertaken region-wide. This project will test a number of different strategies for building thermal tolerance in corals, including stress testing thermotolerant genotypes, stress hardening of juvenile corals, and transformation of algal symbionts.

The results of this project will demonstrate whether: (1) there are diagnostic differences in gene expression and/or genomic signatures that identify thermotolerant genotypes of A. cervicornis; (2) stress-hardening corals can increase thermal tolerance of outplanted O. faveolata and S. siderea, but there may be ecophysiological tradeoffs; and (3) higher temperatures and proximity to adult corals with thermotolerant symbionts both increase the abundance of these symbionts in juvenile corals.

• Florida

Restoration

Funding Ended

https://www.coris.noaa.gov/search/rest/find/document?searchText=projectNumber%3A31204%20OR%20projectTitle%3A"Testing%20strategies%20to%20increase%20thermal%20tolerance%20of%20restored%20corals%20in%20Florida"&start=1&max=10&f=searchPage