Climate Change and Land-use Histories
We are developing new and unique oceanographic and environmental archives from coral skeleton records to better understand the compounding effects of land-use and environmental change on coral reef health.
Hydrogeology and Reef Health
We are conducting geophysical and geochemical research to address questions about coastal groundwater-to-reef flow and coral reef health, with the goal of informing management decisions related to planning and implementing activities in priority watershed-coral reef systems.
Reef Hydrodynamics and Sediment Processes
We are developing a better understanding how tides, waves, currents, and both land- and reef-derived sediment influence the development of coral reefs and their adjacent shorelines.
Role of Reefs in Coastal Protection
We are combining ocean, engineering, ecologic, social, and economic modeling to provide a high-resolution, rigorous, spatially-explicit valuation of the coastal flood protection benefits provided by coral reefs and the cost effectiveness of reef restoration for enhancing those benefits.
Reef Resource Assessments - Planning for the Future
We are mapping and assessing all of the important geologic and oceanographic factors to identify those coral reefs most at risk and those reefs that are potentially the most resilient and the most likely to recover from natural and human-driven impacts.