Department Fish Ecology and Evolution

One of the most important factors for the success of any coral reef gardening project is the resilience of the local coral populations. Understanding their thermal thresholds is paramount to project future impacts due to climate change, and to determine key performance targets for active interventions aiming at increasing coral thermal performance. The goal of this project is to incorporate the information about the thermal thresholds of the dominant coral species in the red sea into a spatially-explicit population genetic model to understand the population-level responses to the future climate scenarios. Another important goal of the modelling is to inform the efficacies of different methods of assisted adaptations of the coral species.