HIMB) are using selective breeding in corals to speed up natural evolutionary processes and better understand if heat tolerant coral colonies produce offspring better suited to dealing with climate change.
Researchers will identify thermally tolerant corals in the field, breed them in the lab and expose them to anticipated future climate conditions to see how they cope with the increasingly stressful environments they will face. The most resilient corals will then be out-planted and the results of this selective breeding process will be monitored in the field.
Bleached corals lose the algal symbionts living within their cells and can die if they do not recover quickly enough. This process is becoming increasingly frequent and severe, challenging ecosystems everywhere to keep up.
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation today announced it will fund $7.2 million in research grants to promote the resilience of coral reefs, with the aim of understanding how to conserve and restore them in the face of climate change.
Paul G. Allen Family Foundation grants $7.2 million to support researchers working to help coral reefs survive the impacts of climate change. New Research Seeks to Crack the Code of Coral Reef Heat Resilience | EFE Comunica | Agencia EFE
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Spotting coral bleaching from space
First global satellite network is now scanning coral reefs in real-time.
The Allen Coral Atlas Monitoring System, New Caledonia on April 26, 2021.
A world-first space-based coral reef monitoring project has just got off the ground – literally. The Allen Coral Atlas project is now using high-resolution satellites to scan nearly a quarter of a million reefs across the globe – from space – to monitor coral-killing bleaching events in real-time.
“The current prognosis for the world’s coral reefs is bleak,” says remote sensing expert Chris Roelfsema from the University of Queensland (UQ). “With ever-warming, more polluted and acidic oceans, models predict that 70 per cent to 90 per cent of coral reefs will be lost by 2050. Until now, there hasn’t been a global system in place to monitor coral reefs under the stresses that may lead to their deaths.”