Coral Reef Arks: An In Situ Mesocosm and Toolkit for Assembling Reef CommunitiesJason L. Baer 1, Jessica Carilli 2, Bart Chadwick 3, Mark Hatay 1, Anneke van der Geer 1, Yun Scholten 4, William Barnes 4, Jenna Aquino 1, Ashton Ballard 1, Mark Little 1, Jared Brzenski 5, Xiaofeng Liu 6, Gunther Rosen 2, Pei-Fang Wang 2, Jose Castillo 5, Andreas F. Haas 4, Aaron C. Hartmann 7, Forest Rohwer 1
1Department of Biology, San Diego State University, 2Energy and Environmental Sciences Branch, Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific, 3Coastal Monitoring Associates, 4Department of Marine Microbiology and Biogeochemistry, NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, 5Computational Science Research Center, San Diego State University, 6Department of Aerospace Engineering, San Diego State University, 7Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Moored midwater geodesic structures called Coral Arks provide a modular, scalable, and vertically adjustable research platform that can be used to build, monitor, and perturb coral reef communities in previously inoperative areas, including offshore.
