Project: CAREER: Integrating Ecological Principles of Sponge-Dominated Coral Reefs in the Education Curricula

NSF Award Abstract:
The drastic mortality of coral reefs and the low probability of recovery to previous coral states, call for a need to understand how the “new coral reef” community can sustain biodiversity. Recent studies demonstrate that coral reefs shifting from complex coral-dominated communities to macroalgae dominance are unstable and may enhance sponge-dominated reefs, a state becoming common in the Caribbean Sea. How do sponge-dominated reefs function and change the ecosystem structure? And how do they continue to respond to thermal stress? This project aims to answer these questions by evaluating the persistence of sponge-dominated reefs under thermal anomalies and their potential to sustain coral reef biodiversity or aid local extinction. Ecological principles of sponge-dominated reefs are integrated into education curricula to foster the growth of future scientists and/or citizen scientists at local, regional, and global levels. A high school curriculum on coral reef ecology principles in English and Spanish is developed for teachers to download and use in their classrooms. The outreach component includes open seminars for students and faculty to discuss the competitive myth, aiming to improve the female perception of high-level jobs in academia, research, and policy. In addition, it offers youth in foster care the opportunity to explore career paths in marine science.

Species interactions alter how each species adapts to change and constitute one of the essential forces structuring ecological communities. However, most theories and experiments on coral reef dynamics do not provide enough information to predict coral reef benthos interactions, succession and evolution. The project evaluates and predicts how current and future Caribbean and Florida coral reefs (sponge-dominated) are changing with a central focus on benthic interactions such as: competition for space by evaluating current and future trends of coral reef benthic interactions under the effect of thermal anomalies; symbiosis, by disentangling how benthic species interactions and associated symbionts function in sponge-dominated reefs; facilitation by discerning to what extent sponge communities serve as habitat-forming animals and how can they sustain coral reef biodiversity; and education by using these ecological interactions as principles to develop teaching, mentoring, and outreach activities from high-school to post-doctoral levels with an inclusive constructivism pedagogical approach. The project evaluates patterns through 15 years of severe and multi-year thermal anomalies in two locations and three years across the Caribbean Sea and Florida, from tropical latitudes in the southern Caribbean Sea (Panama and Barbados) to subtropical latitudes in the Florida Coral Reef Tract. Mathematical models are developed to predict future changes at a regional level. A new technological approach, The BeamSea True-Color Lidar and Fluorescence (TCLF) imager, is implemented in this project to discriminate among similarly colored species and automate the collection of species and species interactions data.

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.