I've got a gig next week at the Railway Club, the fantastic music venue at the corner of Dunsmuir and Seymour in downtown Vancouver. Don't worry, I'm bringing my laptop, not the guitar I have not played (well) in years. I'll be talking about coral reefs as a part of Café Scientifique Vancouver. C'mon down!
Here's the description:
"Beyond Nemo: Coral reefs in a warming world"
Coral reefs, often called the rainforests of the ocean, are thought to be more sensitive to climate change than any other ecosystem on the planet. Drawing on his research in the Central Equatorial Pacific nation of Kiribati, Simon Donner will talk about the effects of changes in climate and ocean chemistry on tropical corals and the potential for adaptation.
Thanks for the presentation. It was a fun environment to hear an interesting talk. I'm quite interested in the replacement of branchy corals by lumpy corals in areas with warm temperature spikes (El Nino zones, for example). I think a neat project would be to determine which kinds of fish generally find refuge in the less branchy corals and then determine if a prediction of increased dominance of that fish species comes true. Of course there are lots of potentially neat projects. Something I didn't ask during your hours of answering questions is what you're going to do next -- where you think this research needs to go over the next 10 or so years. Perhaps worthy of a blog post?
ReplyDeleteHi Simon, I thought I'd make a plug for this Stanford thing that, while perhaps aiming below the level of most university students, does a pretty good job of explaining some of the important ideas underlying ocean acidification. Here's a document:
ReplyDeletehttp://i2i.stanford.edu/publications/Fauville_et_al_2011.pdf
And here's the virtual lab:
http://i2i.stanford.edu/AcidOcean/AcidOcean.htm