Convergence: RAISE: Engineering Coral Reef Recovery

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With an estimated annual global value of $1 trillion, coral reefs are critical to food security, shoreline protection, biodiversity, tourism, and jobs. Yet corals have suffered widespread global death in the last 50 years due to diverse and interacting threats including heat stress, overfishing, algal overgrowth, pollution, disease, runoff, coastal construction, dredging, changing water chemistry, and habitat loss. Because corals generally grow very slowly, their current reproduction, survival, and growth rates cannot keep pace with the ongoing losses. This project will target the complex and compelling challenge of coral reef restoration through Convergence Research. Specifically, the project will bring together expertise, methods, and researchers from engineering (materials and mechanical) and biology (microbiology, coral reef science, and geobiology) to make transformative advances in coral reproduction and juvenile survival through materials engineering for coral restoration. This program may have impact on coral reef restoration and restoration science, and also on the economies and communities that depend on these ecosystems to support tourism and fisheries. The outcomes of this research may have broad impact in fields outside of coral reef science, including aquaculture, surface fouling, ocean engineering, drug discovery, biomaterials, and microbial biofilm research. The project will support the training of three graduate students and one post-doctoral researcher. To inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, diverse public outreach activities will focus on coral reef science, marine conservation, and education about combining engineering and biology to create powerful tools for ocean health. This research tackles a fundamental problem blocking coral reef recovery: juvenile recruitment and survival. Currently, corals suffer from widespread recruitment failure and over 98% of coral settlers outplanted for restoration die within two years. Altering coral population dynamics can shift reef systems back toward desirable organisms (corals, coralline algae, herbivores) and away from harmful competitors (pathogens, macroalgae, turf algae, cyanobacteria). The project will use a large-scale, iterative, convergence-based approach to engineer novel substrates for coral propagation. The team will design, fabricate, and test a diverse array of substrates using materials novel to coral restoration. After substrates are deployed to the reef, the performance of each will be assessed by measuring surface microbial community composition; coral larval exploration, attraction, and attachment rates; coral larval settlement rates; ecological community composition; and coral juvenile recruitment, growth, and survival. These data will be measured using metagenomic sequence analysis, experiments with swimming coral larvae, custom-built fluidics systems, ecological community assessments, and skeletal density and microbial community analyses of coral recruits. Substrate characteristics that maximize positive biological outcomes will be incorporated into second-generation substrates with further diversity of millimeter-scale features. The top-performing substrate characteristics will be incorporated into 3D substrates for coral restoration and tested against materials traditionally used in coral propagation. Convergence Workshops will foster the integration of coral biology and engineering, providing hands-on experience in 3D modeling, materials fabrication, and coral propagation. Results will be disseminated broadly through a website, social media, conferences, journal articles, and outreach.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.