Coral cover surveys corroborate predictions on reef adaptive potential to thermal stress.

ABSTRACT: As anomalous heat waves are causing the widespread decline of coral reefs worldwide, there is an urgent need to identify coral populations tolerant to thermal stress. Heat stress adaptive potential is the degree of tolerance expected from evolutionary processes and, for a given reef, depends on the arrival of propagules from reefs exposed to recurrent thermal stress. For this reason, assessing spatial patterns of thermal adaptation and reef connectivity is of paramount importance to inform conservation strategies. In this work, we applied a seascape genomics framework to characterize the spatial patterns of thermal adaptation and connectivity for coral reefs of New Caledonia (Southern Pacific). In this approach, remote sensing of seascape conditions was combined with genomic data from thre

SUBMITTER: Selmoni O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7661510 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature