About

Our group is broadly interested in how changing climate and water quality alter the functioning of marine ecosystems with an emphasis on the maintenance of coral reef structures and the ecosystem services those structures provide.

We prioritize questions of interest to local governmental agencies, non-profits, and community groups in Puerto Rico including collaborating with the non-profit ISER Caribe on a range of projects relating to coral reef restoration and optimizing Ulva seaweed aquaculture, the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources on water quality impacts on coral reefs, and supporting students to lead environmental compliance monitoring of the EcoEléctrica power plant .

We also make publicly available tools to support research, management, and conservation efforts including integrating area-normalized carbonate production rates into the benthic image annotation software CoralNet to automatically estimate coral reef growth from images, salinity normalizing total alkalinity data to determine if coral reefs are net calcifying, and modeling the bioerosion potential of restored Diadema antillarum sea urchin populations.

Please email Professor Travis to discuss potential collaborations or to join our lab as a student or postdoc.