Response of Corals to Local and Global Stressors: from gametes to adults

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

R-ECOLOGS

URL

-

Start date

9/1/2010

End date

-

Budget

405,783 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The worldwide biodiversity is degrading rapidly under the mounting pressure of human activities, being threatened by local stresses (e.g. pollution, sedimentation) and global impacts (e.g. global warming), and this is more particularly true for coral reefs. Scleractinian corals, which serve as structural elements of the reef and provide a habitat to many important fish and reef species, play a key role in maintaining the extraordinary marine biodiversity present in coral reefs. Despite land-based contamination is often cited as a key cause of coral reef degradation, yet there is a paucity of data on the contamination status of many of these reefs and on the effects of local stressors on coral health. In addition today, the combination of high temperature and local stressors is a common (or developing) environmental scenario in many tropical coastal areas, and many questions arise, such as, do chronic local stressors reduce the resistance and resilience capacity of corals to cope with temperature increase? This question is pivotally important because worldwide actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are long and difficult to implement. Meanwhile, local stressors have the potential to be mitigated and controlled more easily, and may improve the resilience and resistance of coral reef ecosystems facing global warming. In this context, the project R-ECOLOGS will aim to better understand the interaction between local contamination and temperature on the response of adult corals and early life stages. This project will address important knowledge gaps on the response of corals to the combined effects of local and global stressors and on the influence of past contamination of corals on their ability to face temperature increase. Moreover, by increasing our understanding on the response of corals to local stressors, this project will allow identifying proactive indicators of coral health that will provide information, that is temporally relevant to proactively managing the resources at a local scale (e.g. improving water quality criteria quality) before any irreversible damages occur. With topics on the characterization of the contamination status in tropical areas, on the development of proactive tools to assess the coral health, and on the response of corals to the combined effects of local and global stressors, this project will provide new and crucial information that will be help to assess, predict and respond to the interaction between global change and local pressures in coral reef ecosystems. Results of this project will serve to maintain reefs in the best possible health to face the less manageable environmental shifts associated with climate change (global warming), by developing the rationale to more effectively manage the release of land-based contamination into coral reefs.