[Coral-List] [EXTERNAL] Re: CORDAP's new roadmap to understand natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals

Wed Oct 4 08:04:09 UTC 2023

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for pointing this out! CORDAP stands for Coral Research and Development Accelerator Platform. CORDAP is the only international organization fully dedicated to funding global research and development for coral restoration and conservation. We are deeply rooted on science and engage with coral researchers and experts to understand what the major gaps and needs are in coral research - particularly on coral restoration - so that we can help close the gap. If you want to know more about CORDAP I invite you to visit our website www.cordap.org<http://www.cordap.org> and apply for the call we have currently open (until November 10 we are accepting Concept Notes of projects). Each project - comprised of international teams - can take place anywhere in the globe and may receive up to USD 1.5 M.

Best,
Carla

________________________________
From: Douglas Fenner <douglasfennertassi at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2023 7:44 PM
To: Carla S. Lourenco <carla.lourenco at kaust.edu.sa>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Coral-List] CORDAP's new roadmap to understand natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals

Carla,

   Thank you for this post.  I'm not familiar with the abbreviation "CORDAP" and I would think that very few of the 10,000 people subscribing to coral-list all over the world, would either.  When we publish articles, we are required to define all abbreviations and acronyms.  Doing so is helpful and courteous to readers.  I am sure it is defined in the document that you linked to, but readers shouldn't have to download something to find out what it refers to.  Could you please post on coral-list what it refers to, and maybe just a little about where it is located and what it does??
     Thank you!   Cheers, Doug

On Tue, Oct 3, 2023 at 4:14 AM Carla S. Lourenco via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov<mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>> wrote:
Dear all,

Please find below information on a newly release roadmap for understanding natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to climate change.

CORDAP releases R&D Technology Roadmap for understanding natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to climate change

The IPCC predicts that if warming reaches 2°C, 99% of all coral reefs will be lost in less than 30 years. If corals lack what it takes to naturally rapidly adapt to new environmental regimes, they may fail to survive a warming ocean. CORDAP just released a roadmap for harnessing the potential of assisted evolution to help save corals worldwide.

While recent studies have shown that corals may exhibit some degree of adaptation to ocean warming, it is unclear whether corals are able to survive the rate of temperature change during heat waves that will become more frequent under several climate change scenarios. This is where assisted evolution could be a game-changer.

Growing our understanding of the power of adaptation

In January 2023, CORDAP held a workshop on assisted evolution co-organized with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) as part of CORDAP’s Scoping Studies. The aim was to develop a visionary roadmap, offering recommendations on how to prioritise assisted evolution in R&D investment in the future. The first step in creating this strategy was to pinpoint where we are now in our understanding regarding the potential and impacts of assisted evolution on enhancing coral tolerance to stress conditions like ocean warming. Our experts unanimously agreed that assisted evolution methods cannot be understood and evaluated without a solid foundational understanding of natural adaptation, and identified some knowledge gaps that can be closed with relatively minimal effort and others that will require substantial investment of time and resources.

Key Findings:

  *   Standardising methods, experimental designs, species selection guidelines, and terminologies will help to understand natural adaptation and assisted evolution more rapidly.
  *   Long-term funding is critical to facilitate multigenerational studies, which are needed to deliver essential but largely missing information about coral evolution.

Building the best pathway for research and investment

This roadmap sets out tangible recommendations for future investment and research, to help fill critical knowledge gaps that could assist natural adaptation and evolution of coral reefs in a warming world.

Overall, the roadmap recommends investment in a mixed portfolio of R&D, ranging from technologies with lower perceived risks to those with higher percieved risks and longer R&D horizons. This strategy is advised because of the uncertainty around future heating trajectories and thus requirements for enhancement of tolerance.

The roadmap outlined four main areas of work that need to be undertaken:

  1.  Leading global coordination and synthesis.

Recommendation: Building global infrastructure to support research would dramatically accelerate the generation of knowledge around the natural and assisted evolution of corals. This could include compiling and committing to a set of standards and methods that will allow more studies to be used in predictive models, as well as establishing a global resource-sharing network and database to facilitate meta-analysis and synthesis.

  1.  Optimising generation and use of knowledge.

Recommendation: Make sure new studies are well designed and timely. Optimize published and future studies by characterizing relationships between heat stress metrics and other facets of coral fitness.  Having funding set aside to be able to quickly respond to bleaching events will ensure vital knowledge is captured rather than lost if and when those events occur.

  1.  Filling critical knowledge gaps in multigenerational coral data in the laboratory and field.

Recommendation: Given the slow-growing nature of coral, longer-term funding would allow researchers to gain critical knowledge needed to estimate the multi-generational benefits and risks of implementing assisted evolution methods in the wild. Standardised approaches repeated in different parts of the world would add confidence to generalise those results.

  1.  Supporting the advance of existing and new technologies.

Recommendation: Methods that may yield a larger effect (e.g., gene editing, hybridisation between species, and assisted migration) are also potentially of greater risk and would need considerable R&D. Expanding support for some of the riskier long-term projects currently being overlooked, could potentially offer a greater return on investment, but should be balanced with continued investment in less risky technologies.

CORDAP will be using these recommendations to prepare new accelerator program and we believe that they will assist academia in understanding gaps and needs for future research as well as helping to guide funding agencies on where their money will be most effective.

The roadmap identifies the funding structures and research priorities that are most likely to yield the knowledge needed to ensure that assisted evolution methods can be implemented effectively. Ultimately, conserving and restoring coral reefs in warming climates will require an inclusive infrastructure involving many partners at a local, national, and international level.

Download the full report<https://cordap.org/wp-content/uploads/CORDAP-Technology-Roadmap_Assisted-Evolution_Sept2023.pdf<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://cordap.org/wp-content/uploads/CORDAP-Technology-Roadmap_Assisted-Evolution_Sept2023.pdf__;!!Nmw4Hv0!22eWUoHR9o60HoVUaYdlHbxMz2RIyVl3r_VWDLhUjmBEmTSGZeG1vpbPXpe-oTnr8H0kWK9JegpXMdWfcmPAF_Jvut1mkqAgFg$>> to find out the priorities of research and funding for understanding natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to climate change. Report here: https://cordap.org/wp-content/uploads/CORDAP-Technology-Roadmap_Assisted-Evolution_Sept2023.pdf<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://cordap.org/wp-content/uploads/CORDAP-Technology-Roadmap_Assisted-Evolution_Sept2023.pdf__;!!Nmw4Hv0!22eWUoHR9o60HoVUaYdlHbxMz2RIyVl3r_VWDLhUjmBEmTSGZeG1vpbPXpe-oTnr8H0kWK9JegpXMdWfcmPAF_Jvut1mkqAgFg$>

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