CAREER: Coral calcification during the industrial era

珊瑚是在热带海洋中发现的动物，它们一生都会构成坚硬的骨骼。最终，这些骨骼被粘合在一起，形成珊瑚礁。珊瑚礁是受到气候变化威胁的重要生态系统。实验室实验表明，珊瑚骨骼的形成过程受到海洋变暖和酸化的负面影响。海洋变暖和酸化是由人类自19世纪中叶以来释放到大气中的二氧化碳(CO2)引起的。实验室实验经常在几周到几个月的时间里测试这些影响，但气候变化会在几十年到几个世纪的时间里影响海洋中的野生珊瑚。研究野生珊瑚如何受到这些变化影响的唯一方法之一是测量它们骨骼过去的生长速度。珊瑚形成年带，就像年轮一样，创造了它们随着时间的增长的记录。该奖项将支持一项研究和教育相结合的计划，重点放在学生培训、改善珊瑚数据访问和公众参与方面。具体地说，该计划将改进珊瑚骨骼分析方法，并建立一个虚拟珊瑚核心库。该项目还将创建一个互动应用程序，学生或公众可以在其中与珊瑚数据互动，并为众包数据分析做出贡献。在该职业奖下进行的研究将解决工业时代珊瑚钙化率长期变化的驱动因素。该项目的第一阶段将侧重于开发用于珊瑚岩心增长率分析的新工具，并建立虚拟岩芯资料库，使所有现有珊瑚岩心CT扫描可供公众查阅。这将使大数据方法成为可能，通过优化分析和统计方法，可以处理来自热带各地的数百个岩心的过去增长率，提供最全面的测试，以确定在过去一个世纪或更长时间的海洋变暖和酸化下，野生珊瑚的增长率是否发生了变化。这些核心的增长率测量将是透明的，可追踪的分析文件与每个核心一起保存在虚拟存储库中，使全球的研究人员能够进行多观察者分析。随后将通过虚拟资料库分析珊瑚生长的年际变异性，或根据生长率重建过去的气候变异性，包括继续增加在该项目期间收集的新岩芯。该奖项还包括教育活动，包括制定K-12课程计划，整合珊瑚骨骼的新颖三维全息投影，以及基于将开发的可视化珊瑚核心的应用程序的大学级STEM课程计划。该项目由海洋地质学和地球物理计划、已建立的促进竞争研究计划(EPSCoR)、生物海洋学计划和海洋教育计划联合资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.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.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.