The mosaic reef : leveraging genetic differences and local heat resilience for stewardship-based coral conservation
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The health of coral reefs and their associated ecosystem services are threatened by compounding anthropogenic impacts including ocean acidification, overfishing, and ocean warming. Passive and active conservation strategies, such as marine protected areas (MPAs), coral aquaculture, and assisted migration, have been employed to protect these priceless ecosystems. Because these actions are relatively recent, guidance is still needed to inform decisions on where to place MPAs, which corals to use in restoration, and how to scale these practices most effectively and equitably. In this dissertation I address these knowledge gaps by examining genetic differences and local heat resilience of coral and their associated endosymbionts to help inform stewardship-centered coral reef conservation. I present visual bleaching scores as a reliable, efficient, and accessible means of assaying individual bleaching phenotype to identify corals for use in conservation and restoration (Chapter 1). I demonstrate that there is strong population structure over short spatial scales within five unique clades of the symbiont genus Cladocopium across the Palauan archipelago and that approximately 10% of corals shift their dominant symbiont clade post-transplantation to match that of their new environment (Chapter 2). In addition, I utilize a two-step, rapid bleaching assay paired with common garden tests to show that thermal tolerance is stable in 75% of heat tolerant colonies when they are moved to new locations (Chapter 3). Finally, I exemplify how and why ecosystem participants can be key players in scaling coral restoration globally and present a framework for scientists, managers, and practitioners to draw on when planning restoration initiatives (Chapter 4). Taken together, these chapters present acute heat stress tests and common garden experiments as methods to scale the identification of thermally tolerant coral holobionts for use in restoration globally and highlight the importance of centering stewardship in reef restoration practices.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Armstrong, Katrina Clara |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Crowder, Larry B |
| Degree supervisor | Palumbi, Stephen R |
| Thesis advisor | Crowder, Larry B |
| Thesis advisor | Palumbi, Stephen R |
| Thesis advisor | Hadly, Elizabeth Anne, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Ramos, Jorge |
| Degree committee member | Hadly, Elizabeth Anne, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Ramos, Jorge |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Biology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Katrina Clara Armstrong. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Biology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/zq383qw0780 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Katrina Clara Armstrong
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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