Anderson Mayfield, Dr. (assistant scientist), Coral Reef Diagnostics
You don't need an elegant predictive model to tell you what's going on with coral reefs these days; as seawater temperatures continue to rise as a result of climate change, thermo-sensitive corals continue to decline in abundance across the globe. Where data science comes in handy, however, is in what I refer to as "coral reef triage;" by that I mean, in the likely event that we can't save everything, which corals and coral reefs do we prioritize for preservation? Where are the refugia characterized by the unusually hardy corals that may have a chance of weathering the storm? Historically, we answered these questions by randomly stumbling upon corals and coral reefs that, for whatever reason (e.g., environmental factors or unique adaptations of the corals themselves), were unusually robust. Given the incredibly small percentage of coral reefs characterized to date (<0.0001%), however, simply hoping to come upon climate change-resistant corals by chance alone is neither a time- nor cost-effective conservation strategy.
In this presentation, I use JMP Pro to demonstrate how we can instead leverage data from laboratory experiments and coral reef surveys to predict where we will find the most stress-prone corals, as well as those that display a marked capacity for resilience. By triaging coral reefs across a spectrum of climate resilience, we can not only make more informed management decisions, but we can actually use machine learning and other predictive modeling tools to dictate the optimal mitigation and/or bioremediation ("coral rescue") approach(es) for particular reefs.
