Coral Reef Conservation Research
What can we do to help coral reefs survive a changing environment?
Coral reefs are among the most complex and threatened ecosystems on earth, and our attempts to understand their mechanics have mostly failed to yield actionable information. On a global scale, it is clear that reefs are declining, in terms of health and extent. On local and regional scales however, we see differential responses by reefs to environmental change. We’ve observed some reefs improving, some reefs declining, and sometimes mixes of good and poor health in small geographic areas that are subjected to the same environmental conditions. In this unaccounted for heterogeneity is our lack of fundamental knowledge about coral reef dynamics – and also a source of optimism!
Why do some reefs recover from a harmful event when others don’t? Why are there diseased reefs right next to healthy reefs? These are questions we don’t have strong answers for yet.
Research to Action
The Batangas region of the Philippines has extremely high marine biodiversity and also high levels of anthropogenic impact. It is near Manila, one of the largest cities on Earth, suffers from destructive fishing practices, poor waste treatment, agricultural and industrial runoff from the land, and many other human-made stressors to reefs. Given the dominant paradigms in coral reef ecology, we would assume the reefs in the area are in severely degraded states or gone completely. In reality, this region has some of the healthiest and most resilient reefs on our planet – a true hope spot! Understanding what makes this area thrive under stressful conditions is essential to understanding how we can save other reefs. We strongly suspect that local upwellings (water currents that bring deep water to the surface) and oceanic currents are delivering cold, nutrient rich and acidic waters to the area. Even though these things are usually considered bad for reefs, in this case we suspect they are bolstering their resilience to stress. We are able to create artificial upwellings, which is a promising technology for helping reefs survive climate change! We first have to determine if upwellings are the driver of reef resilience in this region, and whether reefs that aren’t accustomed to these fluctuations in temperature, pH and nutrient levels will tolerate them. This project is the first step to assessing whether artificial upwellings are a viable technology to use on vulnerable coral reefs.
Evidence-based experimentation with new technology is going to be an important tool for conserving reefs worldwide, but understanding why reefs are what they are is what will facilitate conservation without the need for intervention.
Research to Knowledge
Coral reefs are complex systems that are usually treated like simple linear systems when they are studied. Coral reefs exhibit nonlinear and nonequilibrium behavior including chaos, feedbacks, multistabilities, cascading effects, phase shifts, and emergent phenomena. Our observations of coral reef systems are low dimensional by necessity, but these small windows in space and time are particularly susceptible to mirage patterns, which are artifacts of observing a mixed scale of nonlinear dynamics and analyzing these linearly. Patterns and order emerge at different scales to the mechanisms of their constituents, so modeling mechanisms is only meaningful at a specific and well-defined scale. Understanding the boundaries and integration of these scales is how we will be able to develop general conclusions and predictions about the system as a whole, instead of just its parts.
For example, we know certain types of organisms are often around when a reef is doing well, but we also see these organisms associated with heavily degraded reefs. These types of correlations are often interpreted to be causal drivers of ecosystem dynamics, when it is more likely that they are ‘important’ only at a particular scale in space and time. If we were to scale in or out, their significance would disappear. In a complex ecosystem like a coral reef, a functional relationship between two types of organisms is not enough to identify a fundamental pattern for the whole system, because the relationships and actors will change and rearrange in order to cope with new environmental regimes. Almost all coral reef science uses assumed relationships between variables in the reef ecosystem (like percent coral cover and temperature) to try to understand them, and those assumptions lead to large errors. Another approach is to identify the physical rules governing the system, and then investigate the way biological systems can optimize energy partitioning within those constraints. This framework is analogous to treating a coral reef like an ‘ecosystem metabolic pathway,’ which deals with the flows of energy through a whole system, instead of one thing affecting one thing. This approach allows us to identify deep patterns in the way reef ecosystems are organized, and will allow us to forecast what will happen in the future more than presumptive mechanistic models.
This project is a pilot study for the region and will establish research protocol for future work in this area. It has two primary research objectives, one practical and one theoretical, to cope with both the urgency of the coral reef crisis and the need to develop better foundational knowledge:
1. Understand the role of upwellings and currents in the health and resilience of Batangas coral reefs
2. Investigate how metabolic efficiency scales from microbial cells to assemblages to whole coral reef ecosystems
The primary benefits of investigating these are to:
1. Establish critical foundational knowledge that is needed to experiment with artificial upwellings – a technology with potential to save threatened reefs
2. Establish a theoretical basis for energy flow through coral reefs and meaningful scales of observation – both essential for correctly understanding dynamics
Budget
The budget covers all operational expenses for the principal investigator and research assistant for 10 days of fieldwork. Please see methods for a comparison between observational only and observational + sampling fieldwork.
Observational Only
Flights: 1200
Lodging: 800
Boat Fees: 2000
10% unexpected expense: 400
Total: 4400
Observational + Sampling
Flights: 1200
Lodging: 800
Boat Fees: 2000
Shipping Fees: 300
Sampling Equipment: 1000
Analysis: 700
10% unexpected expense: 600
Total: 6600
Methods Overview
Observational
18 study sites are distributed along a gradient of upwelling influence. Some sites are completely within the upwelling range, some are partially exposed to upwelling waters, and some are not exposed but still within a similar environmental context.
100m belt transects will be photographed at a resolution of 1m. Three transects will be completed for each of three depth contours at 5m, 10m and 15m depths for a total of nine transects per study site. The photographs will be analyzed for macroscopic diversity and size distributions for each species. Video transects will be completed for fish surveys along the same transect lines. Fish diversity, abundance, and size distributions will be analyzed from video. Measurements of temperature, salinity, and pH will be recorded for each transect.
Sampling (funding dependent)
Water samples will be collected for each study site and analyzed for dissolved oxygen, pCO2, zooplankton diversity and abundance, phytoplankton diversity and abundance, dissolved inorganic nitrogen, dissolved inorganic phosphorous, iron concentrations, and chlorophyll a and b concentrations.
If permits are issued, coral specimens will be collected to assess skeletal health and growth rates.
If permits are issued, drone surveys will be performed over each study site to assess bulk properties of coral reef structure, composition, and oceanographic properties.
**This project overview is intended for a general audience, please message directly with any technical questions or comments!**
Far Away Projects is organized to advance environmental sustainability, make education and science available to the underprivileged, increasing the availability of nutritious foods in food deserts, and support public benefit initiatives.
guidestar.org/profile/82-1917723
charitynavigator.org/ein/821917723