NSF Award
2444864
Corals are animals found throughout the tropical oceans that construct hard skeletons throughout their lifetime. Eventually these skeletons are cemented together to form coral reefs. Coral reefs are important ecosystems that are threatened by climate change. Lab experiments have shown that the coral skeleton-building process is negatively impacted by ocean warming and acidification. Ocean warming and acidification are caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) released to the atmosphere by humans since the mid-19th century. Lab experiments often test these impacts over weeks to months, but climate change affects wild corals in the ocean over decades to centuries. One of the only ways to study how wild corals have been affected by these changes is to measure past growth rates in their skeletons. Corals develop annual bands much like tree rings creating a record of their growth over time. This award will support a combined research and educational program focused on student training, improving coral data access, and public engagement. Specifically, the program will improve methods for coral skeletal analysis and build a virtual coral core repository. The project will also create an interactive app in which students or the public can interact with coral data and contribute to crowdsourced data analysis.<br/><br/>Research conducted under this CAREER award will address the drivers of long-term changes in coral calcification rates during the industrial era. The first stages of the project will focus on developing new tools for growth-rate analysis from coral cores and building the virtual core repository to make all existing coral core CT scans publicly accessible. This will enable a big-data approach in which several hundred cores from across the tropics can be processed for past growth rates with optimal analysis and statistical methods, providing the most comprehensive test of whether coral growth rates in the wild have changed under the past century or more of ocean warming and acidification. The measurement of growth rates in these cores will be transparent, with the traceable analysis files saved in the virtual repository alongside each core, enabling multi-observer analysis by researchers across the globe. Subsequent analysis of interannual variability of coral growth, or reconstruction of past climate variability from growth rates, will be enabled by the virtual repository, including continued addition of new cores collected during this project. This award also includes educational activities including the development of K-12 lesson plans that integrate novel 3-dimensional hologram projections of coral skeletons, and college-level STEM lesson plans based on an app that will be developed to visualize coral cores. This project is jointly funded by the Marine Geology and Geophysics Program, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), the Biological Oceanography Program, and the Ocean Education Program.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
