Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration in the Omics Age

About this book

The rapid demise of coral reefs worldwide has spurred efforts to develop innovative conservation and restoration methods. Many of these rely on omics approaches to produce genetic, genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic or metabolomic data to inform conservation and restoration interventions. This book provides the state of play of this field. It discusses topics ranging from how genomic and environmental DNA (eDNA) data can be used to inform marine protected area design and cryopreservation strategies, the use of knowledge on adaptive genetic and epigenetic variation to maximise environmental stress tolerance of coral stock, harnessing transcriptome data to develop early warning markers, the use of microbial symbiont omics data in guiding restoration strategies, to applications of metabolomics and genetic engineering. How best to translate omics data to resource managers is also discussed.

Contents

- Introduction to Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration in the Omics Age
- Incorporating Genetic Measures of Connectivity and Adaptation in Marine Spatial Planning for Corals
- Maximizing Genetic Diversity in Coral Restoration Projects
- Identifying, Monitoring, and Managing Adaptive Genetic Variation in Reef-Building Corals Under Rapid Climate Warming
- Selective Breeding to Enhance the Adaptive Potential of Corals
- Coral Conservation from the Genomic Perspective on Symbiodiniaceae Diversity and Function in the Holobiont
- Dynamics of Bacterial Communities on Coral Reefs: Implications for Conservation
- Increasing Coral thermal Bleaching Tolerance via the Manipulation of Associated Microbes
- Epigenetics and Acquired Tolerance to Environmental Stress
- Can Gene Expression Studies Inform Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration?
- A Need for Reverse Genetics to Study Coral Biology and Inform Conservation Efforts
- Informing Coral Reef Conservation Through Metabolomic Approaches
- Environmental DNA for Biodiversity Monitoring of Coral Reefs
- Cryopreservation to Conserve Genetic Diversity of Reef-Building Corals
- Synthesis: Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration in the Omics Age

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Biography

Madeleine van Oppen is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. She completed her PhD on the molecular biogeography of seaweeds in 1995, followed by postdocs on the population and evolutionary genetics of Cichlid fishes and reef-building corals. Her current research is aimed at enhancing climate resilience of corals.

Manuel Aranda is an Associate Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. In 2006 he completed his PhD on the evolution of gene regulatory networks in insects, followed by a postdoc in the same field before moving to work on corals. In his current research he uses genomics and epigenomics approaches to study the molecular underpinnings of the coral-algal symbiosis and the potential of human interventions to increase their resilience.