Predicting coral adaptation to global warming in the Indo-West-Pacific

Abstract

The potential of reef-building corals to adapt to increasing sea surface temperatures is often speculated about but has rarely been comprehensively modeled on a region-wide scale. Here, we used individual-based simulations to model adaptation to warming in a coral metapopulation comprising 680 reefs and representing the whole of the Central Indo-West Pacific. We find that in the first century of warming (approximately from 50 years ago to 50 years in the future) corals adapt rapidly by redistributing pre-existing adaptive alleles among populations (\"genetic rescue\"). In this way, some coral populations - most notably, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, New Caledonia, and the southern half of the Great Barrier Reef - appear to be able to maintain their fitness even under the worst warming scenarios (at least in theory, assuming the rate of evolution is the only limitation to local coral recovery). Still, survival of the majority of reefs in the region critically depends on the warming rate, underscoring the urgent need to curb carbon emissions. Conveniently, corals adaptive potential was largely independent of poorly known genetic parameters and could be predicted based on a simple metric derived from the biophysical connectivity model: the proportion of recruits immigrating from warmer locations. We have confirmed that this metric correlates with actual coral cover changes throughout the region, based on published reef survey data from the 1970s to early 2000s. The new metric allows planning assisted gene flow interventions to facilitate adaptation of specific coral populations.