As the clock struck 1 p.m. on Wednesday, October 25, campuses around the nation celebrated Food Day by biting into an apple at the same time to raise awareness of healthy eating. Here in Miami, however, apples do not grow naturally, so University of Miami students, faculty and staff bit into a tasty dragon fruit as a part of the UM Food Fair.

The Food Day 2017 events, which have been organized annually by the Office of Civic and Community Engagement in collaboration with the Butler Center for Service and Leadership and Green U since 2011, began Tuesday night with a keynote talk by renowned writer, activist and food security expert Raj Patel. On Wednesday, student organizations, University departments and community partners gathered for the annual Food Fair to expose students to food issues that affect all of us daily.

“Food Day is not only about healthy eating,” said Teddy Lhoutellier, UM’s sustainability manager, who oversees the Green U Office’s efforts. “We engage people on organic, local, fair trade food; food waste management; community supported agriculture; community gardens; and food donations. It’s actually about the whole spectrum of food integrity.”

The organizations and community partners at the event, Lhoutellier explained, advocate for living in environmentally friendly ways and are committed to providing alternatives to the way our current food system grows, distributes and wastes food. Each community partner offered something unique regarding nutrition in South Florida. The Food Recovery Network promoted its mission to decrease food waste and end hunger in the region, Common Threads highlighted the importance of cooking as a life skill, and The Fruit & Spice Park offered samples of exotic fruits and vegetables.

More than ever, student involvement this year was critical to the event’s success. The ECO Agency student organization participated with the goal of encouraging students who had never tasted vegan desserts to sample its vegan cookies and brownies as proof that dairy is not necessary to make their favorite treats delicious. ECO also had a group of freshman representatives who made organic smoothies and buckwheat crepes to show the ease of preparing healthy food options.

Plant Based Canes, a student organization started last year by senior Natalie Hickerson, quickly ran out of its vegan pumpkin cake pops. Yet the students continued to table for their organization, which educates people about the impact of animal products on the environment, and hand out infographics detailing the benefits of a meatless diet. The CommUnity Garden Club was recruiting members for the new food garden being designed for next spring in the UM Arboretum.

Most every environmentally conscious organization on campus was involved in some way in the Food Day festivities, all with a common cause to make campus just a bit greener.

“This leadership position allows me to spread my passion for the environment and promote sustainability,” said freshman ECO Agency representative Alexis Cambridge, and whether that means providing students with tips on how to reduce their environmental footprint or making spinach and mango smoothie samples, she does it with a smile.

— Aaliyah Weathers / UM News

The post Focus on Food first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

MIAMI (July 25, 2017)—A new study found that Caribbean staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) are benefiting from “coral gardening,” the process of restoring coral populations by planting laboratory-raised coral fragments on reefs.

The research, led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and partners, has important implications for the long-term survival of coral reefs worldwide, which have been in worldwide decline from multiple stressors such as climate change and ocean pollution.

“Our study showed that current restoration methods are very effective,” said UM Rosenstiel school coral biologist Stephanie Schopmeyer, the lead author of the study. “Healthy coral reefs are essential to our everyday life and successful coral restoration has been proven as a recovery tool for lost coastal resources.”

In the study, the researchers set out to document restoration success during their initial two years at several coral restoration sites in Florida and Puerto Rico. Their findings showed that current restoration methods are not causing excess damage to donor colonies as a result of removing coral tissue to propagate new coral in the lab, and that once outplanted, corals behave just as wild colonies do.

Staghorn coral populations have declined as much as 90% in the Caribbean since the 1980s. As a result, the species was listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 2006 to help protect and conserve these species that form the foundation of the biologically rich coral reef habitats.

The findings, published in the of the journal Coral Reefs, offers a guide for successful restoration and recovery efforts of the threatened species worldwide.

Thousands of corals are raised in laboratories and planted onto degraded reefs each year. This study is the first to collect baseline coral restoration survival and productivity data at regional scales including data from 1,000s of individual A. cervicornis colonies, more than 120 distinct genotypes within six geographical regions to develop benchmarks to fully assess the progress and impacts of the region’s coral and reef restoration efforts.

Coral reefs provide many goods and services including fisheries habitat, food for humans and other ocean species, and protection against natural hazards such as hurricanes. As a result, coral restoration is viewed as an effective and cost-efficient strategy to buffer coastlines from the effects of storm surge and sea-level rise.

“Coral reefs are declining at an alarming rate and coral restoration programs are now considered an essential component to coral conservation and management plan,” said Diego Lirman, UM Rosenstiel School professor of marine biology and ecology and a coauthor of the study. “Our findings provide the necessary scientific benchmarks to evaluate restoration progress moving forward.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with U.S. Acropora Recovery Program partners: Nova Southeastern University, University of Miami, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Mote Marine Laboratory, The Nature Conservancy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The public can get involved in restoration through the UM Rescue-a-Reef program, where citizen scientists help plant nursery-grown corals onto depleted reefs alongside scientists.

The study, titled “Regional restoration benchmarks for Acropora cervicornis,” was authored by: Schopmeyer and Lirman from the UM Rosenstiel School; Erich Bartels, Cory Walter from Mote Marine Laboratory; David Gilliam and Elizabeth Goergen from Nova Southeastern University; Sean Griffin from I.M. Systems Group, NOAA Restoration Center; Meaghan Johnson and Caitlin Lustic from The Nature Conservancy; and Kerry Maxwell from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Funding for the study was provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Award #NA09NFF4630332).

— UM News

The post Coral Gardening is Benefiting Caribbean Reefs, Study Finds first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

UM Rosenstiel School researchers study particles released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels to better predict future climate changes.

MIAMI (July 17, 2017)—In a new study, scientists found that aerosol particles released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are a primary driver of changes in rainfall patterns across the globe.

The results of the climate system-model simulations conducted by researchers Brian Soden and Eui-Seok Chung from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science revealed that changes in clouds, as a result of their interaction with these man-made aerosols in the atmosphere, are driving large-scale shifts in rainfall and temperature on Earth.

A southward shift of the tropical rain belt is thought to be the leading cause of the severe drought conditions experienced in large portions of Africa and South America during the second half of the 20th century, which have caused significant impacts to local communities and water availability in these regions.

Using multiple climate model projections, the researchers measured the effects man-made aerosols have had on rainfall changes in the 20th and 21st centuries to discover that when only greenhouse gases or natural climate forces are considered, climate models are not able to capture the southward shift of the tropical rain belt. The analysis suggests that man-made aerosols are the primary driver of the observed southward shift in rainfall patters throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

“Our analysis showed that interactions between aerosol particles and clouds have caused large-scale shifts in precipitation during the latter half of the 20th century, and will play a key role in regulating future shifts in tropical rainfall patterns,” said UM Rosenstiel School atmospheric scientist Chung, the lead author of the study.

Changes in the radiative properties of clouds from the increase of these man-made particles in the atmosphere is resulting in large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation that drive regional climate and rainfall, says the researchers.

“Human-induced changes in rainfall can have substantial implications for society and the environment by affecting the availability of water,” said Soden, a UM Rosenstiel School atmospheric sciences professor and the senior author of the study. “Our work helps to understand the mechanisms that drive large-scale shifts in precipitation to better predict how the climate will change in the future.”

The models the researchers used also found that the largest shift in rainfall patterns will occur over the tropics rather than in the mid-latitude northern hemisphere, the greatest source region of these man-made industrial aerosols.

Understanding these aerosol-cloud interactions are necessary to better model future changes in tropical rainfall worldwide, said the researchers.

The study, titled “Hemispheric climate shifts driven by anthropogenic aerosol-cloud interactions, was published online July 17 in the journal Nature Geoscience and was supported by grants from the NASA ROSES Program. DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2988

— UM News

The post Man-Made Aerosols Identified as Driver in Shifting Global Rainfall Patterns first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

MIAMI (July 11, 2017)—The results, which include information during the last glacial and interglacial periods, showed that relief from the current dry spell across the interior of the Middle East is unlikely within the next 10,000 years.

“Local governments generally prefer the narrative that the region is only in a temporary dry spell and better prospects of water availability lay ahead,” said the study’s lead author Sevag Mehterian, a Ph.D. student at the UM Rosenstiel School. “Our study has found evidence to the contrary, suggesting that in fact, the future long-term trend based on paleoclimate reconstructions is likely towards diminishing precipitation, with no relief in the form of increased Mediterranean storms, the primary source of annual precipitation to the region, in the foreseeable future.”

Stalagmites are calcium carbonate deposits that slowly grow on cave floors and, under the right circumstances, record changes in the climate outside the cave in their chemical composition.

“We take what we have learned from the past climate and applied it to better understand what to expect moving forward with the current state of the changing global climate,” said study co-author Ali Pourmand, an associate professor of marine geosciences at the UM Rosenstiel School.”

The researchers found that climate during the last 70 to 130 thousand years, including during the last interglacial as recorded in the interior of the Middle East, is closely linked to the climate of the North Atlantic region. By comparing their findings with others, they saw a close connection between water availability and enhanced solar insolation across the mid-latitudes of Eurasia. The study showed that solar insolation is not returning to high values relative to today until another 10,000 years from now.

The researchers determined the depositional age of the two stalagmites, collected in Qal’e Kord Cave in central northern Iran, using a technique called uranium-thorium geochronometry conducted in the UM Rosenstiel School’s Neptune Isotope Lab. The paleoclimate data, which included mainly changes in the oxygen isotopes of the calcium carbonate deposits, were then compared to similar records from other caves, ice cores, and sediment records as well as model predictions for water availability in the Middle East and west central Asia today and into the future.

The study, titled “Speleothem records of glacial/interglacial climate from Iran forewarn of future Water Availability in the interior of the Middle East,” was published May 15 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. DOI:10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.03.028. The study’s authors include: Mehterian, Pourmand, Arash Sharifi, and Peter Swart from the UM Rosenstiel School; and Hamid Lahijani and Majid Naderi from the Iranian National Institute for Oceanography and Atmospheric Science in Tehran. National Science Foundation grants AGS-1103489 and EAR-1003639 provided funding for the study.

— UM News

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UM President Julio Frenk signed onto a declaration in support of upholding pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (June 8, 2017)—The University of Miami has joined a growing list of U.S. cities, states, businesses and higher education institutions that are committed to implementing and upholding ambitious actions on climate change.

A coalition that includes The American Sustainable Business Council, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Sierra Club and others, coordinated an open letter for local, state, business and higher education leaders to declare that they will forge ahead in protecting the global climate in the absence of committed U.S. federal leadership.

On June 1, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The 2015 Paris Agreement is lauded as a historic feat of global cooperation. The accord calls on its 195 original signatories—all countries except Syria and Nicaragua—to commit to reducing greenhouse emissions.

“The Paris Agreement is a forward-looking achievement of unified action by most countries against one of the most serious threats facing humankind,” tweeted President Frenk on June 1, just hours after Trump’s announcement. “Today, University of Miami reaffirms our commitment to research and work on climate change.”

The new coalition signatories represent more than 120 million Americans in 125 cities—from Los Angeles and Houston to Pittsburgh and Dubuque—and nine states, which contribute to more than $6.2 trillion to the U.S. economy. Businesses from varied industries, ranging from technology and media to retail and health, have also signed on, accounting for more than $1.4 trillion in total annual revenue and including over 20 Fortune 500 companies.

In addition to the University of Miami, the declaration includes more than 183 colleges and universities, including Columbia University, New York University, Northwestern University, Tufts University, George Washington University and others.

Universities have a valued role to play in developing innovative and sustainable ways to adapt and mitigate climate change impacts.

The Paris Agreement used the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in 2013-2014, the most comprehensive analysis of climate change ever produced, as a basis for framing a sustainable future with reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Two University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science faculty joined hundreds of scientists from around the world to write the 5,000-page report. Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences, was a coordinating lead author for the chapter on near-term predictions and projections in the IPCC’s fifth report, while Brian Soden, also a professor of atmospheric science, was lead author for the chapter on observations. Soden was also a lead author on the IPCC’s fourth assessment report, released in 2007, the same year the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

From his first months at the University of Miami, President Frenk has committed to using science to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. During his inauguration in January 2016, he said the University would increase its scientific research into climate change and its impacts.

“This is exactly the kind of transformative, global contribution that Miami can and should be making to the search for sustainable solutions,” he said.

Learn more about the University of Miami’s work on climate change.

— Jessica M. Castillo / UM News

The post University of Miami Stands with Paris Accord first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (May 30, 2017)—It will take more than a single scientific discipline to sound the alarm on the health consequences of climate change. It will require a team of researchers and clinicians working together to come up with more objective analyses on the disease burden associated with rising temperatures, drought, and other climatic conditions, agreed a group of researchers meeting Tuesday at a climate and health symposium on the University of Miami campus.

“We need a convergence of the sciences, and when that can happen, we can engage more people in adapting to climate change,” said Naresh Kumar, associate professor of public health sciences at UM’s Miller School of Medicine and one of the organizers of the one-day symposium.

Held in the Senate Room of UM’s Shalala Student Center, the conference addressed a range of issues relating to climate’s potential impact on human health, including the large concentrations of dust that are blown across the Atlantic each year from arid regions, reaching places as far away as the Southeastern United States.

“There are viable microorganisms that are coming over with the dust,” said aerosol chemist Joseph Prospero, a professor emeritus at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, noting the presence of bacteria and fungi in wind-driven soot from Africa. “But does the dust impact health in this region? That’s the bigger question. We have no evidence at this time that it does. But no one has looked at it in any detail. If we find that there is an impact, we’d like to be able to set up some sort of a warning system to alert populations.”

Humans are to blame for some of the climatic and environmental impacts on health. “We’re loading our lakes with chemicals that affect fish and the quality of the water,” said UM College of Engineering Dean Jean-Pierre Bardet, who noted the insecticide called naled, which is used to kill mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus but can break down in the environment and potentially affect human health.

Data can be one of the best weapons at our disposal to adapt to climate change, but the problem, said David Kelly, professor of economics in UM’s School of Business Administration, is that most of our data is weather related.

“Weather is a random event. It’s much more difficult to take steps to insulate yourself from the adverse health effects that can result from bad weather,” said Kelly. “Climate change, though, is different. It’s a much more slower process over a longer period of time. Over time you learn that the climate has changed and you’re able to take some steps to adapt to the new climate and reduce the health impacts.”

He noted the European heat wave of 2003 that resulted in 70,000 deaths. “It was still a weather-related event,” he explained. “If we had a [temperature increase] of 10 degrees in France over a period of centuries, they could have taken steps to adapt to the higher temperatures. The number of deaths wouldn’t have been zero, but it wouldn’t have been 70,000.”

Florida has adapted better than northern states to warmer temperatures, compensating with more air-conditioning and advanced AC filters. But in states where the weather is not consistently warm, “people might not see the need to spend a lot of money on adaptations like air-conditioning,” said Kelly, going on to explain that spikes in temperature in such states can lead to more deaths.

“So it becomes a challenge of how to account for the adaptation when you’re trying to figure out the effect of climate change on health,” said Kelly. “You can look at the effects of weather on health and hope that it tells us something about the effect of climate on health. But you can’t measure adaptation with weather data. Or you can work directly with the climate data, the long-run averages. Then you can directly account for adaptation in your statistical model, but your data set will be much smaller.”

The symposium, sponsored by the Department of Public Health Sciences, the Miller School of Medicine, and the Copeland Foundation, also addressed communication efforts aimed at reporting on climate change and its health impacts, with Megan Ondrizek, executive director of communications and public relations at UM, highlighting the Climate Change and Zika Virus special reports produced by her office, University Communications.

“Our role in University Communications is to collaborate with University partners and share information across various platforms, to our varied audiences,” said Ondrizek. “We are not only communicators but connectors, and in that capacity, we have positioned our researchers and faculty members as experts in emerging issues, such as climate change and public health challenges.”

Other UM researchers who presented at the symposium included Roni Avissar, dean of the Rosenstiel School; Dushyantha Jayaweera, executive dean for research and research education at the Miller School; Mehdi Mirsaeidi, assistant professor in the Miller School’s Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care; Anat Galor, associate professor of clinical ophthalmology at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute; and Amy Clement, professor of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School.

—Robert C. Jones, Jr.

The post Symposium Examines Health Effects of Climate Change first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

The Rosenstiel School’s final lecture of the 2017 Sea Secrets series focused on using science diplomacy to bring marine science together in the U.S. and Cuba and was held at the new Frost Science Museum.

MIAMI (May 19, 2017) — At a time when science seems under attack and truth is contested, researchers in Miami are using the discipline to bridge the 90-mile and decades-long gap with scientists in Cuba.

The recent re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S. is opening new avenues for scientific investigation and environmental conservation.

“It’s funny—usually the environment is the last thing we agree on but in this case, it’s what brought the two countries together,” said Fernando Bretos, curator of ecology and director of MUVE (Museum Volunteers for the Environment) at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, and the first speaker of the Sea Secrets lecture.

The discussion, titled “Coral Reefs and Science Diplomacy: Bridging the Gap with Cuba,” was held Thursday in the Planetarium of the recently opened Frost Science Museum in downtown Miami and was the first scientific lecture hosted at the Museum, which opened May 8.

“We are eager to work together on what we anticipate will be a long collaboration between the university and the museum,” said Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Dean Roni Avissar, who opened the final lecture of the 2017 Sea Secrets Lecture Series, presented by the Rosenstiel School and the Ocean Research and Education Foundation.

Bretos highlighted the Trinational Initiative for Marine Science and Conservation in the Gulf of Mexico and Western Caribbean, started in 2007, as a meeting platform for Cuban and U.S. scientists, and expanded to include Mexican scientists, he said, to help to buffer any tension between the U.S. and Cuba and allowed the work to flow much more smoothly.

Bretos, who has a personal connection to Cuba—his parents came to the United States under Operation Peter Pan—has been collaborating with Cuban marine scientists for 18 years. His research focuses mainly on sea turtles in Guanahacabibes National Park and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, located on the western tip of the island.

The park, and other coastal areas of the island, have some of the most pristine waters and wild marine ecosystems.

“Cuba is somewhat of a mecca for turtles,” said Bretos, an alumnus of the Rosenstiel School. “It has a huge amount of beach, feeding habitat and large expanses of sea grass.”

There are progressive coastal development and preservation policies in place in Cuba, said Bretos, and coastal areas are managed pretty well, but it’s an issue of scale, which may become problematic with increasing tourism to the island.

Increasing tourism to Cuba, and global anthropogenic changes to the environment are harmful to coral reef ecosystems as well as sea turtles and other marine mammals.

“Coral reefs are dying around the world in great numbers, for many reasons, but perhaps the most important reason is climate change and warming sea surface temperatures,” started Andrew Baker, an associate professor of marine biology and ecology at the Rosenstiel School and the second lecturer.

He started off with the bad news, he said, to provide some background on the good news—using molecular genomics and collaboration with Cuban scientists to help save the world’s reefs—and to communicate why Cuba’s coral reefs are so interesting and how they can play a role in replenishing dying or dead corals.

The warming sea surface temperatures stress corals, causing the critical partnership of algal symbionts—zooxanthellae, which live on the corals and give them their beautiful colors—to break down in a process called coral bleaching. During coral bleaching, the corals expel these algae, lose their coloration and turn white, and often die.

Corals can recover from bleaching, explained Baker, but if they don’t, they die.

“As a coral biologist and conservation scientist, the goal is, if we can’t prevent corals from bleaching, we can at least give them routes to recover so that they don’t go down this one-way path and point of no return,” said Baker, head of Rosenstiel’s Coral Reef Futures Lab.

One solution Baker is working on to help save the world’s coral reef ecosystems? A method that uses the same science behind popular DNA genome sequencing services like 23andme and Ancestry.com.

“Using these molecular genomic methods, we can assess the connectivity of corals around all these different regions (in the Caribbean), in an attempt to try and figure out how these coral reefs are connected to one another,” he said.

Analyzing satellite imagery, Cuba is very interesting from an environmental conservation perspective, explained Baker. Heat maps of water around the region show that there are very distinct thermal temperatures throughout the area.

“There are areas in Cuba that are both exceptionally cool and exceptionally warm; the difference is about 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Baker. “That’s the global temperature increase we’re expecting to see within the next century. Essentially, corals in one area could outlast by a century the corals in another area.”

Corals along the southern coast of Cuba are particularly heat-tolerant. Baker and his fellow researchers are using heat maps to help them consider moving the more heat-tolerant corals to new places, as a way of helping restore reefs in one area, in the hope that corals will be more heat-tolerant overall and better able to replenish and recolonize reefs.

Baker pointed out that coral bleaching is going to become more frequent and more severe in the coming years. The amount of coral that we’re losing means that we may lose coral reefs as we know them, he said, as these systems that generate lots of biodiversity.

“Biological diversity is the stuff of life that ultimately provides robustness to ecosystems,” said Baker. “Biologists will tell you this all the time, that diversity provides resilience.”

Baker’s research focuses on interventions that try to increase biological diversity in populations.

“There’s a very good argument to be made about the assisted immigration of Cuban corals to the U.S. to boost diversity and ultimately resilience,” said Baker. “And there’s some parallels here in human life as well.”

He recognized that some of his talk focused on the bad news of how climate change is affecting our coral reefs, including how the reefs are the first ecosystem that we’re likely to lose as a result of global warming. But we can’t lose hope, he added.

“We have to balance the cost of doing nothing with the fear of doing something,” said Baker. “Science has an important role to play in determining what that something should be.”

The annual Sea Secrets Lecture Series will begin again in January 2018.

– Jessica M. Castillo / UM News

The post Science as Diplomacy first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

MIAMI (April 27, 2017) — The University of Miami’s (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science announced today a two-year award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to support cutting-edge research in coral conservation. The grant will support coral propagation and restoration efforts necessary to help with the recovery of threatened coral species and increased resilience of coastal communities in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

This project is a collaboration between UM coral biologists Diego Lirman and Andrew Baker, NOAA’s Coastal Ecosystem Resiliency Program, Miami Science Barge, and the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science.

Healthy reefs shape coastlines and provide the first line of defense against weather hazards such as hurricanes. Coral reefs can reduce wave energy by up to 97 percent, thereby protecting low-lying coastlines from erosion and flooding, and by trapping sediments and limiting the need for costly beach renourishment projects.

“The need to enhance resilience through management action is crucial in urban-influenced ecosystems where human and natural stressors interact,” said UM Rosenstiel School Associate Professor Lirman, co-lead investigator of the project. “South Florida has been identified as a global hotspot for coastal urbanization, and the synergistic man-made stressors of habitat fragmentation, overfishing, and pollution, make it an ideal setting for this project.”

Rebuilding healthy and physically complex coral reefs has been shown to be a cost-efficient, natural way to enhance fisheries habitat, promote recreational diving, and buffer the threats of coastal hazards. Coral reef restoration as a natural restoration solution is considered to be two to five times cheaper than using artificial structures.

“Restored reefs, unlike artificial structures, are self-building and self-repairing,” said UM Associate Professor Andrew Baker, co-lead investigator of the project for UM. “They are able to continue to accrete and grow after deployment, catch up to projected sea-level rise, and build long-term resilience to storms.”

During the project, the researchers will outplant nursery-raised staghorn corals onto nearshore reef habitats within Miami-Dade County, identify resilient coral genotypes able to survive the impacts of extreme temperature changes, and develop an outreach and education program to engage the public and coral reef conservation and restoration.

The research and restoration activities will be showcased through interactive public displays as part of the Frost Science Museum’s Inventor-in-Residence program, where the Baker lab will be running experiments in the museum’s Knight Learning Center to increase coral thermal tolerance. The public can get directly involved in restoration through the UM Rescue a Reef program, where citizen scientists will be able to plant nursery-grown corals onto depleted reefs alongside scientists.

Funding for the project consists of a NOAA grant #NA17NMF4630010, totaling $591,920 and non-federal funds of $264,700.

— Rosenstiel / Special to UM News

The post NOAA Funds UM Coral Restoration Research first appeared on University of Miami Special Report: Climate Change.

The 2017 annual “Empowering Capable Climate Communicators” leadership training will be held February 11 and 25 at the Cox Science Building on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus. Sponsored by the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences and The CLEO Institute, the training will first focus on the science and data surrounding climate change before discussing ways of effectively communicating this to broad audiences.

Presenters include University of Miami researchers and NOAA scientists, city planners and elected officials, and climate activists, covering such topics as atmospheric and ocean warming, glacial melt, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, extreme weather, desertification, human health and disease impacts, and extreme weather. The climate communication part of the training will cover community outreach strategies and presentations by student and youth leaders.

Since 2011, Harold Wanless, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, has been hosting the two-day training, part of the Cooper Fellow Training Series.

The event requires pre-registration and is free for University of Miami faculty, staff, and students.

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