Robert Van Woesik
Florida Institute of Technology, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Coral reefs are the most diverse marine ecosystem on Earth, and millions of people depend on them. Rising ocean heat is causing repeated thermal-stress events that damage corals.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
coral reefs
coral recovery
thermal stress
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Quantify differences in coral recovery rates after thermal-stress events worldwide using spatio-temporal Bayesian models, which estimate how recovery varies across both place and time.
- Relate coral recovery rates to the frequency and intensity of thermal stress, geographic location, habitat and local conditions using binary, meta-analysis, inverse-problem and state-space approaches.
- Compare observed and predicted coral recovery to identify reefs recovering faster or slower than expected and assess which local and regional conditions explain the difference.
- Develop free online tutorials in the R programming language and share large-scale coral data and computational resources with teachers, students, scientists and resource managers.
More about the research
Broad climate models predict that few reefs will survive a 3ºC rise in sea-surface temperature. Yet field studies find pockets where corals survive and recover even in hot conditions. Understanding why recovery differs from place to place is central to predicting what will happen to reefs.
Why it matters
Coral reef managers could use this work to find reefs that recover better than expected after marine heatwaves. Those reefs could then be protected from human disturbance as potential refuges while oceans warm. Better predictions of reef recovery matter to people who live and work near reefs. They also matter to reef-associated species and to whether reefs can keep up with sea-level rise.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Benjamin Glass
Boston University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Profile temperature, oxygen and other abiotic conditions at a Bermuda coral reef to define realistic stress scenarios.
Carly Kenkel
University of Southern California, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether differences in staghorn coral shape plasticity are driven by changes in calcification and fine-scale skeletal deposition, using a lab water-flow experiment on clonal replicates of Acropora cervicornis genotypes.
Ernesto Weil
University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, PR·Ecology & Evolution
Measure how the bacterial community (microbiome) in tissue and mucus of susceptible corals such as Orbicella faveolata changes in makeup and abundance before, during and after SCTLD infection, using molecular profiling.
The school
Florida Institute of Technology: 2 labs on PI Pages, $18M a year on research, 49 research doctorates a year.
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