Identifying Coral Reefs of Hope

OVERVIEW

GRANT AWARDED: May 2009. Coral reefs perform many vital ecosystem services for communities in tropical and sub-tropical coastal regions. However, due to warming climatic temperatures, coral reefs are increasingly vulnerable to mortality from bleaching, which occurs when water temperatures rise and corals eject the symbiotic algae they need to effectively process food. This project predicts how coral reefs around the world will respond to warming temperatures and assesses which reefs have the best chance of escaping severe climate change impacts.

Publications and Reports:

Published Papers

Correa, A.M.S., and A.C. Baker. 2011. Disaster taxa in microbially mediated metazoans: how endosymbionts and environmental catastrophes influence the adaptive capacity of reef corals. Global Change Biology 17: 68-75.

Global Change Biology paper 
January, 2011 

Silverstein, R.N., A.M.S. Correa, T.C. LaJeunesse, and A. C. Baker 2011. Novel algal symbiont (Symbiodinium spp.) diversity in reef corals of Western Australia. Marine Ecology Progress Series 422: 63-75.

Marine Ecology-Progress Series paper (subscription needed)
January, 2011 

Clement, A. C., A.C. Baker and J. Leloup. 2010. Patterns of tropical warming. Nature Geoscience 3(1): 8-9.

Nature Geoscience paper (subscription needed)
January, 2010 

Correa, A.M.S., M.D. McDonald and A.C. Baker. 2009. Development of clade-specific Symbiodinium primers for quantitative PCR (qPCR) and their application to detecting clade D symbionts in Caribbean corals. Marine Biology 156(11): 2403-2411.

Marine Biology paper (subscription needed)
October, 2009

Media:

Other Links

University of Miami Coral Reef Conservation Research Lab Facebook Page