REU Site: Coral Reef Biodiversity and Resilience on Little Cayman

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Coral reefs maintain the highest biological diversity in the ocean and are also among the most threatened ecosystems on earth. This award provides funding for a new Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI) located on Little Cayman Islands. The CCMI REU program will provide a unique opportunity for 24 undergraduate students over three years to explore fundamental ecological processes critical to maintaining coral reef biodiversity and resilience. Participating students will have a rare opportunity to conduct research on a small remote Caribbean island with low local development pressure. Coral reefs at this site are recovering from the 1998 El Nino event during which high sea surface temperatures killed corals on a global scale. The processes that are driving this recovery are still unknown. Therefore, this REU affords rich and timely opportunities to closely examine ecosystem stress and recovery from a number of perspectives. The multidisciplinary team of scientific mentors included in this REU are researching topics aimed at understanding global and local threats from climate change and ocean acidification (OA), and physical, chemical, and ecological disturbances on coral reefs. Experiments and field work examining fundamental organismal, community and ecosystem functions will be integral to this research. The research conducted by REU undergraduate participants will advance our knowledge of the processes that drive coral reef resilience to disturbances on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Co-funding for this award is provided by the Directorate for Biological Sciences.