[Coral-List] Invitation for Abstracts for ICRS Session 2D: How will the coral populations of today affect the ecology and recovery of coral reefs in the future?

[Kelly Speare]

Dear Coral List,

The call for abstracts for the 15th International Coral Reef Symposium in Bremen, Germany is open now through February 23, 2022.  We are writing to invite abstract submissions to Session 2D entitled: “How will the coral populations of today affect the ecology and recovery of coral reefs in the future?” The full session description is copied below. We invite new abstract submissions and updated abstract submissions for speakers who had an abstract accepted to our session for the 14th ICRS virtual meeting. We are very hopeful that the 15th ICRS will take place in person as planned, but in the event that this becomes a virtual meeting we are committed to making a virtual session a fun and engaging event for sharing science. Our virtual session for the 14th ICRS was a great success and we look forward to seeing you at the 15th ICRS meeting! Please reach out to us if you have questions about our session or abstract fit for our session. 

Cheers, 

Kelly Speare, Aaron Hartmann, and Kristen Marhaver


Session Description:

Anthropocene coral reefs have undergone massive changes in coral abundance and community composition, motivating ecologists to predict potential trajectories for recovery and factors that could thwart recovery. A growing body of work has identified important pathways by which corals, and the conditions they experience, influence future generations of corals and the assembly of ecosystems around them. For example, corals in denser populations produce disproportionally more larvae than corals in diffuse populations, and environmental conditions can influence the quantity and quality of coral offspring via maternal effects. Transgenerational effects can further influence coral offspring through adaptation (genetic) or acclimatization (epigenetic, microbial, or viral) to environmental change. In degraded systems, relatively weedy coral species are necessary to facilitate natural recruitment and outplant survival of more fragile species. While reefs were once thought to undergo a small number of predictable phase shifts, new datasets reveal complex path dependencies that affect community assemblage on a site-by-site basis. Finally, the re-establishment of coral populations in heavily degraded sites has produced so-called "novel ecosystems" made up of non-traditional, yet ecologically functional, species assemblages. What will coral reefs look like in the next 100 years? How will today's remnant, resilient, and recovering reefs influence these trajectories? This session will bring together ideas from across disciplines to ask the broad question: How are the corals of today influencing the coral reefs of the future? We invite contributions that address this question at all levels, from individual corals, to populations, communities, and ecosystems. This session aims to be highly interdisciplinary, bringing together work from empirical, theoretical, and applied approaches from any reef system.



Kelly Speare, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Scholar
University of California, Santa Barbara