[Coral-List] ICRS 2020 [workshop]: How do we best design, validate, and monitor test-beds for radical reef intervention?

[Diane Thompson]

Dear Coral List:



We would like to draw your attention to a special workshop at ICRS2020,
focused on leveraging ocean mesocosm experiments for assessing solutions
for reef restoration and interventions for resilience.  The workshop will
highlight opportunities at the Biosphere 2 Ocean and SeaSim facilities;
discuss experimental design, validation and monitoring; and outline future
research directions.  Complete workshop details are included below.



*Online registration for workshops will be open until September 1, 2019 (*
www.icrs2020.de).




We look forward to seeing you there.



Best regards,

Diane Thompson

Biosphere 2, University of Arizona



On behalf of the organizing committee:

*Craig Humphrey*, Australian Institute of Marine Science

*Julia Cole*, University of Michigan

*Ty Roach*, Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology

*Raquel Peixoto, *Federal University of Rio de Janeiro



"How do we best design, validate, and monitor test-beds for radical reef
intervention?"



Decades of coral reef research have improved our understanding of the
building blocks of reef resilience - the critical processes and mechanisms;
however, the coral reef community now recognizes the urgent need to apply
this knowledge and move from processes to solutions. Innovative initiatives
have yielded major advances in techniques for reef restoration and
increasing resilience through interventions such as stress hardening,
probiotic treatment, phage therapy, and assisted evolution. These
approaches offer great potential for (re)building resilient reefs that can
better withstand warming and acidification. We identify a growing need to
test these solutions in controlled environments before they are applied in
the wild. Mesocosms provide a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between
observational and experimental studies to test these novel (even risky)
solutions at reef scales. They mimic natural reefs while offering precise
control of environmental conditions and an ability to simulate future
climate variability and change. Such control facilitates research on the
resistance and resilience of restored genotypes to future stress, and on
the persistence of engineered resistance. By capturing many intrinsic
processes, mesocosms allow these solutions to be "scaled up" to test novel
interactions across levels of complexity, species, functional groups, and
trophic levels. Given their potential impact on reef management and
restoration, such experiments must be thoughtfully designed, validated, and
monitored to address potential limitations and increase the applicability
of the findings to natural reefs. Despite challenges, mesocosm experiments
from the Biosphere 2 (University of Arizona) and SeaSim (Australian
Institute of Marine Science) have contributed to significant advances in
our understanding of reef resilience under climate change. This workshop
will bring together international reef scientists interested in leveraging
these and similar facilities to discuss lessons learned and identify the
opportunities and challenges for the next generation of mesocosm
experiments to test radical reef solutions.


_____________________________________________
Dr. Diane Thompson (she/her/hers)
Director of Marine Research, Biosphere 2
Assistant Professor, Department of Geosciences
University of Arizona
1040 E 4th St
Tucson, AZ 85721
520-626-2341
https://uathompsonlab.com/