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Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to today's UTS Science in Focus, which is a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Professor Joanne Tipper, the head of School of Biomedical Engineering and also the acting Dean of the Graduate Research School. And I'll be comparing today's event, collating the questions and asking our speakers the questions at the end of the talk. Today's topic is important for understanding and developing new technologies to address health care problems in the ageing population. Before I introduce our speakers today, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation whose, upon whose ancestral lands our city campus at UTS now stands. I'd like to pay my respects to the elders, both past, present and also emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional owners, the custodians of knowledge for this land. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we begin today's session. It is an online only event, unfortunately. So do bear with us. If we have any technical issues, we'll work as quickly as we can to resolve them. And if you find you're not able to access the talk at any point, the easiest way to rectify that is to log out and then log back in again. That usually resolves these sorts of issues. We will be having a Q&A session at the end of the, the talks for about half an hour, if you would like to ask a question, then please type your question into the Q&A box on your Zoom control panel, and we'll do our best to answer all the questions at the end.

If you like somebody else's question, then you can upvote that question to make sure that it gets asked and you hear the answer. And you can do that by clicking on the little thumbs up symbol next to the question itself. And that will make that question rise up the the list. We will be recording the session today. However, we won't be recording any video or audio input from the audience. If you have any concerns about the recording of the event today, you can contact UTS at science.future@uts.edu.au. And the address is there on this line, so tell us any concerns that you have. So onto the interesting bit today, so our talk today is entitled Mending Broken Hearts with Cells and 3D Bioprinting Technology. Our speakers are Dr. Carmine Gentile from the School of Biomedical Engineering and then two artists who Carmine currently collaborates with, Paul Brown and Linda Dement. So I'm just going to give you a little bit of information about the speakers. So Carmine is actually a pharmacist and now a lecturer in the School of Biomedical Engineering at UTS. He leads the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group at UTS and also at the University of Sydney. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Pisa in Italy and then his Ph.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina in the US. Since 2013, Carmine has worked in Australia, first at the Heart Research Institute, then at the University of Sydney and now at UTS. He's been supported by numerous awards and grants, working with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, industry partners and clinicians to quickly translate his research findings from bench to bedside.

He's an internationally recognised researcher, expert in the field of 3D printing and stem cell technologies, and his more recent studies focus on novel, molecular and cellular approaches to treat cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and heart failure. These studies are based on the use of mini hearts, which he developed as bio-inks for human heart tissues. And that's the subject of today's presentation. Paul Brown is an Earth scientist, a creative artist and a producer. And for over 30 years, he's integrated arts practice, filmmaking and community engagement with university research and teaching. Paul's home base is Alphaville, a Sydney based arts company specialising in projects that link art, science and the environment. Linda Dement has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. She was originally a photographer and she deals with issues of disturbance, comingling the physical and the digital and electronic. With long standing interests in the body and technologies, she's worked with code and robotics and nonphysical code entities and now heart tissues. Paul and Linda have collaborated on a number of projects, including a previous collaboration with Carmine, to create hydrogel patches for life sized human, life sized human heart models. This was part of a display about extending life in an imagined future for the Museum of Futures. So this is where I'm going to pass over to Dr. Carmine Gentile to tell us about his exciting research. So over to you, Carmine.

Thank you so much, Joanne, and for the nice introduction and thanks to the organiser of this meeting today, and it is my great pleasure to share with you some of the latest advancements in this field, the research that we've been conducting in the past over 15 years. Again, I'd like to thank the Australian Museum for this great opportunity to talk to you guys about what we do. And together with the Royal Botanic Gardens, we were supposed to have this presentation directly from the museum. The museum allowed us to have this virtual background, virtually presented from the from the museum today. Now, let's start with the presentation and why we actually care about creating 3D bioprinting partitions. Now, we do know that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and by cardiovascular disease we include several conditions and in particular patients that suffer from a heart attack. They may develop what is called heart failure, which is an irreversible problem in the heart function that does not allow the heart to pump blood in our body anymore. It affects, on average, one person per hour. So you can imagine by the end of this talk, at least on average in Australia, is going to be somebody that is going to develop heart failure. Now, despite the fact that there is a lot of mismatch between organ donors and receivers, there's been a lot of focus on utilising different types of technologies, including stem cells, to create new ways to treat heart failure.

Now, let's talk a little bit more about what the real problem is about. Now, imagine the heart is composed of different building blocks, which are the cardiac cells, the muscle cells. Now following a heart attack, what happens is that multiple ones of these cells are not receiving oxygen and nutrients. Therefore, these cells are actually dying. Now, what we try to identify is a way to use stem cells that can be generated in different ways to basically create new cells that can replace, therefore, the missing building blocks in the muscle wall. Now, this has been the focus of several studies in the past years. Now there is the more we have done, the more we understood that there are so many challenges, so many difficulties. First of all, by injecting muscle cells into created from stem cells into the muscle of our patients. There is a problem of a potential arrhythmic effect. Therefore, the heart is pumping differently in different areas. There is also the problem of developing what is a type of cancer typical stem cells called teratoma. At the same time, if cells are transplanted from one donor to the other, there is the current need for immunosuppression, which is typical of any heart transplant. And most importantly, the majority of these cells actually die because the by simply, simply injecting them into the, into the patient, they're not able to survive the new environment. So what is the type of solution that we came up with? So first of all, we wanted to identify how to isolate cells from the same patient.

And we can do that in our lab by isolating the skin cells or blood cells from the patient. These are then utilised to create the stem cells, which are also called by either induced pluripotent stem cells. So once we are able to create these stem cells, they're therefore able to use blood, that became the first stem cells to make up all the cardiac cells that we need for our transplantation. But now we do know that transplanting them directly will lead to limited survival of the cells. Therefore, as bioengineers, we identify a way to create a friendlier environment. Therefore, creating a three-dimensional cardiac patch that can be helped, can help in this process, in generating a viable and functional tissue for the patient. Now as bioengineers, we need to talk about several aspects of this project and now in our lives specifically, we use 3D bioprinting technology as a tool that allows us to utilise the knowledge that we know about how the heart forms from the developmental point of view. We also use fancy tools from generated by bioengineers. At the same time, we need to make sure that cells that are utilized in the lab are compatible with the types of biomaterials that we use. Now we understand that the result, there is the need for a multidisciplinary team that is able to communicate with each other. We usually speak different languages from the central point of view. At the same time, what is really important is that we are able to transfer our knowledge in some bioprinted product that can be passed on to the ultimate player in our, in this platform, who is composed basically by the clinicians.

Therefore, we need to make sure that the type of research that we generate in our lab is able to translate from what our knowledge is to the patient via all these different steps. Now we also try to understand how to create the building blocks for this bioprint of heart tissues. Now, I usually refer to my students as in a way I try to promote, you need to become Masterchefs in science. Meaning you have the you need to require it, you're required to acquire all the possible knowledge or all the possible tools that are available out there and then utilising them in order for you to bioengineer heart tissue. Now, why MasterChefs? Isn't it the same for you guys when you're cooking, baking a cake or creating additions. So basically you're bringing together all the different ingredients. Now, in our case, our ingredients are found specifically in a laboratory and are used together with within our team to create the best tissue. Now, what are these components though? First of all, it's important that we are able to recreate the 3D biological ink that is also called bio-ink. This is a composite, this is composed by cells that we identified in in our laboratory that are basically 3D bioprinted, deposited layer by layer into a specific receiving bio-paper that in our case is composed by a gel, high in content of water and, which is therefore called hydrogel.

Now imagine mixing together cells with these gels, receiving the cells, and therefore the ultimate player in this, in this platform is basically the 3D bioprinter that allows the deposition to layer by layer by loading the bio-inks and the bio-paper into the nozzle of the 3D product that is basically regulated by the information that we pass on to the bioprinter. Now, the composition of the bio-inks and the bio-paper basically depends on the application of the type of tissue that we need to generate, but also whether we are using it for in vitro testing or transplantation and so on. Now, before we jump into the ultimate way to develop this, we have to understand what were the potential major challenges for us to transplant bioprinted patch. We identified the basically the patch that we had to generate had to, had to present, basically with the high component of blood vessels. Therefore, the vascularisation was one of the first major challenges in our in our routine, followed by also by the contractility activity. Remember that if the cells that once they've been transplanted are not able to construct and synchronously with the receiving heart, they're not able to communicate properly. And therefore there is the development of a medium.

Now, we actually try to understand from nature how to create a proper blood and blood vessel containing heart tissue. And in fact, we look at human heart biopsies that were stored here in Sydney and also when I went to Harvard in 2016 that were basically received and collected following the past several years where they were not able to be transplanted into, in location. There was no matching donor and receiver component. In this case, we were able to identify and to study how blood vessels are actually important in the development of the heart tissue. What you see on the right side is a 3D rendering analysis of a human heart tissue of a very young person, three weeks old human heart that was basically staying using different  specific technique in our laboratory in order to highlight how the red blood vessels were present throughout the whole heart tissue. Now, we also understood that during embryonic development and what you see on the left side is microscopic images. The embryo presents what are called progenitor cells. These progenitor cells are making up different cell types in our body, blood vessels and also muscle cells in the heart. So what we identify is that for us to create enough building blocks, there is a natural process which is called cell proliferation, which is tightly regulated throughout the development of the embryo. Now this process is reiterated multiple times and allows the generation of the different areas that are found in the human embryo and later on in the in the heart, in an adult heart. Now, how do we go from learning what what nature uses to what we can bioengineer in our lab? Therefore, we start to think about how to create cardiac bionics and we start thinking, OK, what is what is the way we can, what which way we could develop in order to create miniature pieces of the heart that we could use as building blocks.

In our lab we we call this micro or mini hearts cardiac spheroid because their shape is a small sphere. Now, cardiac spheroids or mini hearts are basically the same different terminology for the same culture conditions, where we allow, that allowed us to in the past year to use four different applications that I'm going to talk about in this presentation today. Now, I would like to touch on the fact that basically during my early studies, when I was based in the United States, we were able to make sure that these mini mini components, mini micro tissues, were composed of different cell types. So what you see on the left side, on the top, you see basically a mini tissue, micro tissue that is composed of different mini blood vessels in green. Now, this mini blood vessel could be used to create bigger blood vessels, such as the micro tissue here shown on the bottom on the same image, that when we were actually using them in specific culture conditions in our, in our laboratory, we were able to use them as building blocks. And how they're basically allowing them to communicate with each other. You need to keep in mind that the cells that we use in in the lab, similarly to the cells in our body, are able to cross talk to communicate with each other.

So by basically putting together five different target spheroids, we are able to create a bigger spheroid structure by allowing them to interact, to fuse. So this process was also started in our lab on how two spheroids were able to fuse together over time. But ultimately, we wanted to understand also how to create not only bigger blocks, but also three-dimensional geometrical structures that we are able to control. For this, we were able to identify different ways to use different types of hydrogels, the same type of bio paper that I mentioned at the beginning that allowed the fusion of different cells within spheroids at the area of contact by allowing them also to maintain a certain either tubular or branch structure. So imagine this process reiterated multiple times. And there you go. You have finally your Legos, if you want, to build the different types of structures or tissues that you want to generate in our, in your blood. So specifically for the heart, we identify that there were three major cellular components that we require for our approach. First of all, by looking at the human heart biopsy, as I mentioned before, here in Australia and at Harvard, we identified there are three major cell types. First, we have the muscle cells, cardiac biocides. We have also the cells that make up the blood vessels, which are called endothelial cells in blue, whereas the cardiomyocytes is, cardiomyocytes are represented in red. And then also, we identify a third cell component. The green cells, if you want they are called cardiac fibroblasts. The cardiac fibroblasts are not part of integral part of the blood vessels, but they're actually able to release all the so-called extracellular matrix that allows blood vessels to be found and to communicate properly with the muscle cells.

Imagine this process happening in a testing testing tube. So what happens is that when we start with single cells, we're able to create spheroid mini heart. Now, how to make up the spheroid, cardiac spheroid from stem cells? We start with isolating cells from the human heart biopsies. Imagine these cells were frozen for many years. We identify a way to isolate them and to basically use them in our test tube. Now, as a comparison, we start creating spheroids from stem cells that were identified in our laboratory to recreate to generate the muscle cells. Now, from the comparison of these two types of cell sources. We were able to generate a miniature blood vessel formation. So these images on the left side, you can appreciate microscopic images where we have different cell types together. Again, the muscle cells in red, the green cells are basically making up the extracellular matrix and the blood vessels are in blue. When we use a specific technique to create a three-dimensional analysis of this microscopy image, we identify that all the mini blood vessels that we recreated in our lab were basically present throughout the whole tissue.

And this is really, really important because, any tissue that is thicker than one fifth of a millimetre will develop the cell death in the centre. By recreating these blood vessels, we were able to prevent cell death in the centre and therefore allowing cells in this way to be used as building blocks and create viable, functional bigger structure. Now, we also identify the blood vessels were formed by the crosstalk between the the green cells that were releasing the extracellular matrix and the forming blood cells that were creating the new blood vessels. Therefore, we were able to achieve new blood, new blood vessel formation, by basically allowing these cell types to communicate properly in our lab. Now, there you go. We have this bio-ink information, therefore we try to identify what were the different applications. One includes the patient specific drug testing. Another one includes the development of personalised kind of toxicity testing. At the same time, we wanted to use them for organ printing and promote cardiac regeneration in patients. Now, let's talk briefly about drug testing. So in our lab, by using in context clues, we were able to identify how and to test how toxic drugs such as doxorubicin, which is a well known cancer therapy used for leukaemia, lymphoma patients and breast cancer patients. This specific drug is very effective at killing the cancer. At the same time, it is widely known for promoting toxic effect on the heart of these patients, even several, several years following the treatment. Specifically in kids that suffer from leukaemia and lymphoma that received this drug.

The patients may die up to 17 years following the treatment of doxorubicin because the drug is killing muscle cells, cardiac muscle cells. Now in our laboratory, we were able to identify, first of all, the toxic effect of doxorubicin within one day using our cardiac experience. At the same time, using a chemical and genetic approaches, we were able to identify what were the effects of doxorubicin on the different cell types, muscle cells, endothelial cells and fibroblasts. These allowed us to to basically create potential new therapies that may prevent specific toxic effects of doxorubicin by leaving the opportunity to kill the cancer at the same time. We also used spheroid cultures to mimic, to model what is called cardiac fibrosis, which is typical of, this is the typical stiffening of the heart following a heart attack. This is really important because in some way, cardiac fibrosis is typical or in heart failure patients and is responsible for the development of such a condition that prevents the heart from pumping properly.

Now, let's focus more on 3D bioprinting after all this, short introduction. And basically before we are able to bioprint, should we have to identify what was the optimal composition of the heart in a way that we were able to use polymers and cells in the best way? Now we identify all the cellular components, as far as I mentioned to you guys.

So the next step for us was to identify which type of 3D bioprinter to use. And we have tested several ones in our laboratory. As you can see the nozzle, it was printing in specific containers. Now, what we were depositing to start with were different types of hydrogels. In order to make sure that even after bioprinting, there was the opportunity to maintain these cells in specific locations for a long time. We also identified under the microscope how these types of hydrogels were looking over time and how they were modified. Also, the properties typical of the cardiac cells. We also tried to identify whether this, our cardiac spheroids after the bioprinting process were viable over time, so we tested at least for 28 days following the bioprinting, we were able to maintain them viable without any toxic effects. At the same time, we try to identify whether we were able to promote a new blood vessel formation within the bioprinting construct. We we actually learned again from nature for this process and specifically, the specific, we have used growth factor, a molecule that is utilised in the, in the embryo to promote new blood vessel formation. Now, we used, first of all, we identified using microscopes to how well we were able to promote new blood vessels which are identified in red in the figures on the right side. Now you can see how the arrowheads are pointing out how the the growth factor was able to promote new blood vessels into the bioprinting tissue.

And by using a similar approach to what we showed you before, we are able to recreate a very delicate, delicate and elegant 3D rendering analysis of the whole culture. So what you see here in blue are basically the nuclei of the different cells composed in the bioprinted cardiac spheroids. Together with the, all these brand new blood vessels, they are spanning from the mini hearts that we bioprinted into the surrounding tissue. Now, we also evaluated how to use different spheroids together after the bioprinting. So you can see from on the left side how three spheroids were coming together on the first day after one hour, and then over time, within three days, they were able to fuse together. We use also computational modelling and other approaches to model how well this is happening in our, in 3D. And by again, by looking under the microscope, we identify how beautifully the new blood vessel formation was happening, not only at the level of one single bioprinted spheroid, but also it was passed on from one spheroid to the other one following the fusion in our construct. And I can tell you guys, these type of images took us a lot of time and lot of effort from different team members in our, in our group. Now, we may end up a beautiful bioprinted construct, but how do we actually test whether they are functional or not?

And when we started this project, we were very limited in how to test the contractile function, right, of this three dimensional concept. So basically, we identify different ways to create an ECG like readout to measure how well this bioprinted spheroid would react to different stimulation. Could be chemical, it could be electrical in our heart and so on. So this was a multidisciplinary effort that brought together experts from here and others in the United States and also in Europe. Now, I would like to touch on also on how to improve the bioprinting progress by creating specialised bioprinted patches. Now, this is the focus on one of my students, Chris, that and he's a cardiac surgeon trainee himself. And he's been taking some time off from his surgical training to spend some time in our lab and decide to focus on a full PhD project that tests and evaluates how about 3D bioprinting patches could be a potential solution for heart failure patients. Chris, learned how to basically generate these bio-inks that were basically the first step in our lab. At the same time, these cells have been mixed together within the hydrogel that we have identified in our life and basically three-dimensionally printed using the bioprinter that we have available in our lab. I'd like to highlight the fact that we are very lucky with the support of UTS creating a smaller 3D bioprinting hub here in Australia. Now, the beauty of our studies, especially specifically from increases recent publication, we were able to identify not only that our hydrogel and cell composition allowed us to create a viable and functional tissue, but we are able to, we were also able to create new blood vessels like the one that is shown on the 3D rendering analysis on the left side.

You can see how we can actually navigate inside the new blood vessels that are represented in green by these images and how well, potentially this could be transplanted into the patient. Now, the strategy for all of this is that basically we want to identify the best way to use the scans that are from the clinic. And for this, we're working with clinicians that allowed us to use both MRI and CT scans that allow us to, allow us to create a three dimensional model of the, of the heart of the patient, identify the area that has been impacted and therefore is not functional anymore, and use this information to create the patch that we will be in 3D bioprinted in our lab. Now, all of this information is utilised in the lab. As information that is transferred into the computer that controls the bio printer and therefore the layer by layer, the position of mini hearts within bioprinted hydrogel, is that basically the approach that we're using in our lab nowadays.

So just to give you a short summary of the different advantages from our approach, first of all, we want to learn from nature on how to create, how to promote regeneration. We also want to highlight the fact that there is the opportunity to create a personalised therapy based on the fact that we are using cells from the same patient. Therefore, there is also the opportunity to improve the quality of life, not only for the patient, but also for the family, and we do know that given the lack of, the heart for transplantation in Australia and from memory in around 100 transplantations, around 100 hearts are transplanted in Australia per year. And if you do your calculation, you may come up with basically around ten thousand heart failure patients so that you can you can understand how big the gap is between how they can be transplanted and the risk the patient actually requiring a new heart for transplantation. Now at the same time, I would like to highlight the fact that using cells from the same patient will not lead to any rejection. At the same time, we're using an approach that does not use any other method that is known to be become safer for the patient as well in the long run.

Now, given the fact that there is a lot of emphasis on recreating petris and creating petris for transplantation, I would also like to highlight the fact that nowadays we are using these mini hearts to to mimic complex diseases such as heart attack. Now, recently, we have published a study where we identify what are the different challenges in recapitulating a heart attack in a petri dish and why you may think this is really important. If you think about different conditions besides following the establishment of a heart attack, but also, for instance, nowadays, we do know that COVID, for instance, is affecting more severely cardiovascular disease patients.

This would allow us to create a model tool to basically evaluate what are the effects of COVID on damaged hearts in a test tube before having to wait for the effects of such, such a disease in a patient. And this is actually the focus of several students in our laboratory. And with this, I would like to conclude the presentation by highlighting the fact that I had the recent opportunity to work together with Paul and Linda that will talk after me, on how to basically better communicate the science that we do in our lab. Now, I am, I am aware that some of the terminology that I have used today may not be familiar to many, many or many persons in the audience because of the lack of laymen terms. And that was a great opportunity for me to engage with Paul and Linda. In the same time, I would like to highlight the fact that by working together on a project last year, we were able to create a real size 3D bioprinting patch using the hydrogel that have detailed before and then stitch it onto a 3D printed heart, a real size. From this experience, we actually learn a lot and we understood that there is more research and into what is going to be become essential for, first of all, the personalisation of the page, but also for the delivery of the bioprinter tissue.

Now, there has been a lot of media attention and in the past years, obviously, because of there is a lot of emphasis and there is a need for this bioprinted tissues from both the patients and the family. And there was also a funny story about one of the newspapers that identified put together the news about a fugitive. And that is not actually me, that there was somebody that will give you two hundred thousand dollars potentially to find this person. And I can assure you guys, nobody is giving you any money to catch me, even in this current pandemic conditions. Now, with this, I would like to highlight especially the fact that there has been a very important support by colleagues, students here in Australia and overseas. And we managed to to support ourselves by thanks to the support of different funding bodies, especially from donors that also were affected potentially from cardiovascular disease. And finally, I would like to conclude my talk by thanking the protagonist of all of this story. So today it's been me presenting, but I would like to highlight the fact that all the students in our lab have been spending hours, days, years in the making what we've been able to share with you guys in the last half an hour. And it is now my great pleasure to pass the presentation on to Paul and Linda. And now it'd all you, Paul.

Well, thank you Carmine and welcome, everyone, we're Paul Brown and Linda Dement the artists who are currently in residence with the Cardiovascular Regeneration Group. And together we have a background in creative arts and science and. And last year, we approached Carmine and we found his work to be groundbreaking and visionary and the concept of 3D printing, of living, beating heart tissue is such a rich ground creatively, philosophically and scientifically. We collaborated with Carmine and his team to produce a bioprinted hydrogel patch for a life size model of a human heart. This slide shows the artwork, the heart with the pink coloured patch placed where heart attack damage commonly occurs, and this was exhibited for the museum that features Pandemic Pivot project. And our work was about future possibilities surrounding issues death, dying and the extension of life. It presented a futuristic, though perhaps not that far off scenario of patches being used routinely to repair damaged hearts and extend life. This led us to our current project in residence with a cardio vascular regeneration group for six months to develop our art science interdisciplinary collaboration much further. So far, we've been becoming familiar with the lab and the research as much as is possible during lockdown. And we are fortunate enough to have a lab visit just before lockdown for an introduction to the technology and processes involved. Since then, we've been having interviews with team members online to find out more about particular aspects and details of the research, such as surgical issues, the ways that hearts form and develop in the embryo, experiments on 3D printing structures for cells to grow in, and the transformation of medical scan data into 3D models. All these experiments on 3D printing structures, materials and shapes and the transformation of medical scan data into 3D models, all of these that are of interest to us, as is the functioning of the laboratory itself with its equipment and the techniques of bioprinting and microscopy. And we can think of this as laboratory theatre and find ways to celebrate that. I'm going to pass on to Linda now.

We've also been looking at works by other artists who deal with scientific or medical processes, as well as looking at historical anatomical imagery, we've drawn pictures of cardiac steroids under the microscope. And overall, we've generated far too many ideas. It's early stages for our project at the moment, but we're now heading along two main trajectories, one being the transformation of data into three dimensions for bioprinting and cell cultivation such as converting audio to 3D form. We're interested in formulating 3D shapes that can be used as structures on which to grow heart tissue, to create kind of tiny living sculptures. So, for example, the volume, highs and lows of a heartbeat sound could be used to create the hills and valleys of the three dimensional form that then could be bioprinted to cultivate tissue. For the audio, we're trying out sounds directly related to the human experience of heart trouble, breath, heartbeat, the noises of scanning devices, the sounds patients might make or hear in hospitals. Secondly, we're looking into the process of forming 3D shapes from 2D surfaces, including pattern making techniques such as have been used for years in dressmaking or upholstery. Also, other artists have made paper falling out, some of which has been used to create sculptures of human organs, including the heart. We're asking here, how can 2D surfaces be formed into patches with an accurate fit on individual heart topographies? The unique details of each person's heart and the mobile contracting and expanding volatility of real hearts makes this very interesting and challenging. We're maintaining a blog throughout this project, and we'll make this link available if you want to check in on our progress. The creative arts offers an interdisciplinary and hybrid approach to research. We hope our project will develop alongside the scientific research of the lab in a way that assists communication of scientific findings, that brings new perspectives to the research and perhaps ventures into unexpected territories. We're funded by the Australia Network for Arts and Technology through their Synapse program and also by Create New South Wales. Thank you.

So I'd just like to thank today's, all of today's speakers for some very interesting presentations. We had quite a lot of questions come in through the Q&A and I see the audience has been busy upvoting some questions so we can start with those questions. And we've got roughly about 10, 15 minutes for questions. So we will start with the most popular question, is what is actually in the bioprinted patches and how is heart tissue actually created through bioprinting? So, Carmine, maybe you can start with that one.

Thank you, Joanne. And thank you again to you guys for this opportunity. And thank you guys for listening during your lunch break, I assume, to my presentation today. So I know it's a long story, what I try to share with you guys today, that brings together 15 years right in the making. But essentially what we put in our, in our bioprinter, we try to put together cells that are isolated from the patient. And therefore, nowadays we are focusing more on taking blood from the patient and from this blood make up the stem cells. The stem cells are utilised to make up the heart cells. And then these heart cells are mixed together in our laboratory with a technique that we have developed in the past year to make the mini hearts. Now the mini hearts by themselves, they need to be embedded, mixed with a specific type of hydrogel that we have identified with our studies in the past year as well. And therefore, the mixing of the mini hearts or cardiac spheroids within the hydrogel that we generated in our lab is loaded into the nozzle of the bioprinter. Now, how we create this three-dimensional object is basically some information that we control through a computer. Therefore there is this, there is a computer that dictates in which position on the X, Y and Z axis, we deposit this the bio inks that we create from patients' specific cells. I think the that is the question. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's that's good. And the questions are all moving around now because people are clicking on them. But that's good. And there's a couple of kind of related questions about what other things could the bioprinting be used for in the future and is the technology transferable to other tissues? Say lung tissues.

Thank you again for the question. Now, during my early studies in the United States, I was actually focusing on a more general approach. And basically by identifying as this type of question is actually highlighting, is there a way to create any type of tissues that we require for our body? So during my early studies we identified, the very first component during the body development are basically blood vessels. So in order, in a way to to establish a platform to create any type of cells of tissues for our body, we rectify that by being able to create blood vessels in a test tube as part of the bio-ink, we were able to identify a potential approach that can be shared with other applications. For instance, in our way, in our approach for this specific presentation today, I showed you how to put together blood vessel cells with heart cells, right? And that how we created the bio-ink for the bioprinting of Parkinson's. Others may use different cell types, liver cells, together with blood vessel cells and recreate a 3D bioprint of liver tissues, kidney, brain. And why is that possible? Is based on the fact that all of these different types of organs in our body are actually going through the first initial step of the recapitulation of the blood vessel network. And why is this really, really important? Because any cell type in our body requires some supply of nutrients and oxygen. And that's where blood vessel comes in. And that's why the vascularisation, the generation of new blood vessels has been one of the major challenges for 3D bioprinting in many, many for many, many years. In the past.

Ok, so there's another question, Carmine about how long does it take to make a bioprinted heart?

Ok, thanks again. So it really depends on which side, which step of the research are we talking about? Remember that there is the different steps involved. There are there is the isolation of cells from the patient. There is the generation of the stem cells. There is also the step where we need to create heart cells from the from the stem cells. And then there is the making of the bio-ink and the actual bioprinting process. Now, the bioprinting actually is the simplest, if you want, nowadays, given the fact that the technology has advanced so much in the past years. When I start working on 3D bioprinting technology in 2006, I can tell you that the actual bioprinter was taking almost a full room and it was costing over a million US dollars. Nowadays, you can find a way to create your own 3D bio printer by just looking on YouTube, whatever you want, and you can create your own cheap version of the 3D bioprinting. Similarly, technology has been advanced a lot and the commercially available bio printers that are available nowadays allow us to create a bioprinted patch within minutes. Now, as I just pointed out, the bioprinter requires that you have access to the cells that you want to use for your personalised approach. Now, there is also, there is a lot of requirement that we identified more recently in how to better create these 3D bioprinter patch specifically to cover the area that is being affected following a heart attack. Now, this actually varies a lot now, depending on the type of disease, the type of the damage that the heart is developed. Imagine that depending on where the heart attack takes place, you may have a heart attack area this size, bigger size and so on.

It varies from person to person. You may still require a few weeks in the making or in the making of the stem cells. On average, we identify between four weeks and eight weeks for the making of the stem cells. Once these cells have been isolated from the blood of the patient, followed by the differentiation, the promotion of muscle cells from these cells, which takes usually around one month. Following these steps, you need to make up enough building blocks, as I mentioned during my talk today, depending on the area that you want to call it. And that varies from from patient to patient. So we we expect that once this is fully established for the clinic, we might be able to provide a bioprinted patch within three months from the isolation of the cells. Now are talking about something that what is the state of the art nowadays? But we don't know whether in a few years time all of these processes might be advanced so much that allow us to to create a human heart cabin where the patient would walk in and the technology might be so advanced that the that the cabin is allowing the bioprinting of the patch within the same within an hour. We don't know that. So our hope is that the technology and the research that is available nowadays can further improve how we we actually develop the tissues and the bio-inks in the future to to speed up the whole process in the making as well.

Ok, thank you. Now, one for Paul and Linda. And so there's a couple of questions about where they can find the artistic pieces and also a question about how you how did you design your 3D printed art using sound that seems to be an area of interest.

Linda can start on the sound question.

We haven't finished the sound at work yet, but so far we've been working on using quite simple programming techniques to take levels from frequency and volume, because you can imagine those are just numbers, bigger numbers, louder sound sort of thing, and translating those into shapes which then go over time and then taking all of that time as the third axis to make three dimensions. That's not completed. So that's underway. Paul.

And if you're looking to follow this project, best to go on to the Australian Network for Arts and Technology and that website where you can find our blog and going back through the slides, I won't put it up now, but is the address for that blog. And we're working on this project across the next six months or so. And we expect in October, November, there'll be a lot more production of artworks, which you'll probably be interested to see.

Ok, well, we are really running out of time and there are rather a lot of questions in the chat, 48 questions still to answer. So what I will say is that Carmine and Paul and Linda have agreed to answer the questions offline and we'll be posting those answers on a web link that you'll receive by email from the organisers of the webinar today. So there's really lots of questions about how close is this to patients? How how will patients be assessed for the for the treatment? How will it help somebody in this particular scenario? So there's lots and lots of questions, really important questions that remain to be answered. But unfortunately, we don't we don't have the time now to answer them. But as I said, we will, we will post those answers so that everybody gets their questions answered. There's also quite a few questions from students, saying, you know, what advice have you got and how did you get into bioprinting Carmine. Because it's such an interesting area of and novel area of science as well. So hopefully you'll be able to answer those questions as well.

But it just remains for me to thank the panel for, you know, a really interesting presentation, really lively answers to the questions and also to thank you the audience, for attending today. And us, as Carmine said, you know, giving up what potentially is your your lunch break today to listen to the science. Thank you very much for joining us today. And we look forward to seeing you next time.

Rebuilding the reef 
Alex: [00:00:02] Hi, everyone, and welcome to Science in Focus, a free public lecture series showcasing the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. My name is Dr. Alex Thompson. I'm an industry engagement manager here at UTS in the Climate Change Cluster Research Institute, and I myself am actually a marine ecologist. I'll be the moderator for today's event, collating all the questions and asking our speaker these questions at the end of the talk. So coral reefs are synonymous with the Australian marine environment and a source of inspiration to many. They are diverse ecosystems, bursting with life, bringing enormous value to communities and the broader environment through the ecosystem services they provide. And I've heard many marine scientists refer to them as real life magic. In the past decades, we've seen a monumental shift in the impact to global coral reefs through climate change and other impacts. But there are a group of scientists here at UTS who are working to investigate and implement innovative techniques to restore and rehabilitate reefs both in Australia and across the world. Our speaker today is one of those researchers involved in global coral reef restoration, and this talk today builds on a Science in Focus from 2021. And today we'll hear about the updates to the research efforts on the Great Barrier Reef. Before I introduce our speaker for today, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands and extend that acknowledgement to all the lands that our audience is joining from today. I'd also like to pay respect to the elders, both past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this land.

Alex: [00:01:35] So Professor Dave Suggett, who will be speaking today, is a marine ecologist and leader of the Future Reefs Program within the University of Technology Sydney's climate change cluster. His research over the last 20 years has been to understand how changing environments affect coral growth and survival through development of novel techniques to unlock coral functional biology from genes all the way up to ecosystems. Dave’s work has examined reefs across the world, but has intensively focused on the Australian Great Barrier Reef for the last eight years to understand the limits for coral survival under climate change. This led to founding and leading a world first partnership between tourism research, a program called the Coral Nurture Program to implement new tourism-led coral propagation reef maintenance and rehabilitation approaches. He chairs the International Coral Reef Restoration Consortium, field based Coral Propagation Working Group and is currently the Vice president of the Australian Coral Reef Society. So Dave, I'd like to introduce you today.

Dave: [00:02:34] Hello there.

Alex: [00:02:35] Hi, Dave. I'm going to let you share your slides.

Dave: [00:02:38] Okay. Thank you very much, Alex. So thanks again, everyone, for joining today. And a huge thanks to Alex for the really generous introduction to what we'll be covering today. As Alex said, I lead a program here. I also lead the Coral Nurture Program, which is what we're going to be presenting. And I really want to acknowledge the other co-founders of the program. I see this presentation as really a sort of shared vision that we all have. I particularly also want to pay my deepest respects and acknowledge the traditional elders, past, present and emerging beyond Alex's acknowledgment to all of those custodians, the traditional custodians of knowledge of all the land and sea countries that were really fortunate to operate. And this is a Great Barrier Reef wide program now. And so we have a very heavy footprint throughout many, many countries. We also partner with a huge range of tourism partners, as you'll see, as we unpack this a little bit further, and I've put some of the key names of those involved significantly in the program, either through our core management research, but also operational practice. Without all of these individuals, we really wouldn't have built the scale and the impact that we've been really fortunate to achieve. And of course, all of our funders that similarly have been very generous, enabling us to reach some really ambitious goals over the past few years.

Dave: [00:04:00] But what I'm going to talk about is really where we're at one year on, and I'm hoping many of you joined us 12 months ago to really hear the state of play with which the Coral Nurture Program was evolving as a really significant development in terms of a new stewardship model for the Great Barrier Reef that revolves around propagating and replanting coral to augment natural recovery. It is a historical turning point for reef management, not just in Australia but worldwide. Historically, we've rested on very much passive protection measures, but also acts of mitigation to reduce our stress impacts, certainly not aggressively enough in the case of climate change. And we now realise that of course, that those measures are simply not enough. There's now 1 billion people estimated on planet Earth relying on healthy reefs for survivorship or economies, and quite simply, those stakeholders do not have time for us to reach the really clear goals that we need in terms of mitigating climate change. So we need new solutions in the short term to ensure we have reefs to save. And that is really the goal of a lot of these new active intervention measures that are in play.

Dave: [00:05:12] Australia is pretty new to this and when we look back, probably only five years ago was when we started having the first conversations about should we introduce new management, active management approaches that revolve around more aggressive interventions and fast forwarding to now, this is an array of some of the examples that we have in play and the middle top and the top right images are really from the Coral Nurure Program. But through our work at UTS, within the Future Reefs Program, we've also integrated into a wide range of other types of intervention through research and development, spanning in the top left reef stabilisation and the bottom right, looking to augment sexual reproduction of corals and how they can better survive on reefs. But really our story starts with the main stakeholders of the Great Barrier Reef, the tourism industry. So when we think about the Great Barrier Reef in terms of its economic value and of course there's many values we can consider, whether it's biodiversity or traditional knowledge, it's really the tourism value that carries the dollar value that is quite often talked about through the media in terms of the reef value. And there's maps available demonstrating where the visitation rates are and consequently where the heaviest footprints are. And this is important for lots of reasons. It tells us where the economy is concentrated. But what happened in 2016, 2017, when we had the very first catastrophic impacts through mass coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef, and we've had many since, many of these stakeholders, the livelihoods were really threatened overnight. And the reason is quite simple. Many of the tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef have fixed moorings, which means there's of course real importance to preserve, retain and rebuild the sites where those moorings are at. They're very high value sites. They represent only 7% of all sites of all reefs on the Great Barrier Reef. And where we came into this was through a series of conversations with the tourism industry, was recognising a real hunger for the industry to be equipped with more active measures to aid, restoring or rebuilding or regenerating some of the site health post the mass bleaching event. Waiting for natural recovery alone was simply not sufficient. In the past, these tourism operators have had capacity to intervene through removal of aggressive predators such as crown of thorns starfish and of course, highly motivated to conduct green tourism through sustainable measures as best they can. But having the means to actively contribute to regeneration of degraded areas was seen as a real motivational factor moving forward, not only to retain livelihoods and retain the quality of the sites, but really to help contribute to fast recovery rates that were needed in the face of potentially repeat bleaching events. So we developed a new program in partnership with the tourism industry. Really, and a simple model. The model is the operators themselves conduct propagation and planting activities at scale as a network at those sites, and us as UTS researchers, we are here to provide the science to validate and provide credibility to those activities.

Dave: [00:08:40] So in other words, if the operators are able to claim that they've planted 1000 corals, we can assess how effective that's been and subsequently what is the return on investment. And actually, are those efforts indeed feasible and worth it? That's a really important part that we play. And in order to undertake this as a network, we developed collectively a code of operation. This was incredibly important in terms of retaining trust across the partnerships. This is just a small snapshot of some of the key features of our code of operation, but it really was about focusing on being in line with the World Heritage values, of course, contributing to retaining the tourism industry and the tourism economy and ensuring some social resilience, but really ensuring that this was credible, meaningful and worthwhile.

Dave: [00:09:32] So we presented a lot of this last year in terms of the nuts and bolts of the program. So I'm not going to take the time to do too much of that now. But fair to say, we use a lot of really sophisticated but low tech solutions to be able to do this at scale. We're one of few programs worldwide, and I'll talk about that a little later on that has actually started to really have gains at scales that weren't really considered feasible if you just rewind a few years ago. And these statistics here are taken directly from our Coral Nurture Program website and really convey the footprint we currently operate at.

Dave: [00:10:05] And I won't read these out. You can obviously see these for yourselves, but importantly, the stats and the numbers should hopefully speak for themselves. They are in the tens of thousands in terms of the scale of replanting. Huge number of staff and volunteer hours contribute to this and we're increasing the diversity of corals that are propagate and replanted all the time as we learn more in terms of how to do things better and more effectively and certainly contributing to much more rigorous and accurate ecological values. And if we look at this sort of development over time, and I've shown here the previous, where we were at 12 months ago is in blue, and I'm not going to repeat some of that now, but you can see that we've been through various phases as a program, as we've learnt how to do things and we've developed networks and we've built scale. The area on the red on the right hand side is really where we've been in the last 12 months. We've continued planting at pretty much the same sort of volume as we have throughout other phases. But the important point here is that although we use our plant number as a measure of our activity, it isn't a measure of our success. And those are two important things to distinguish with restoration programs. And I'm going to unpack a little bit more what I mean by that. Those numbers are impressive nonetheless, but I want you to be able to look beyond those numbers.

Dave: [00:11:30] When we really think about the reef, we actually have quite a hard time demonstrating the impact we've had. And the reason for that is the sorts of tools and technologies that have been developed with our planting approaches were deliberately designed to be non-invasive and retain the aesthetics of the sites. These are tourism sites and the important thing is that we didn't want it to look like a construction site. And so what you can see here are various examples of reefs that have been repopulated through the coral propagation. This is probably all about 1 to 2 years old, everything that you're seeing here. And when you take visitors to the reef and I was fortunate enough to do this just earlier this week, it's actually really hard demonstrating what impact you've had in terms of the actual replanting and regeneration process other than asking the visitors to cast their minds back maybe a year ago and imagine, all of this was bare reef. So the visual impact alone is incredibly important. But that's again, just one measure of our success, if you like, in terms of how we operate. What's been critical for us in the last 12 months and part of the reason why our planting numbers have been steady but not necessarily spectacular compared to some of the other phases is we've really been thinking about how do we advance what we do in terms of the effectiveness and scale. That's always a key consideration for us in terms of feasibility and effectiveness and operating as a network. And 12 months ago, this is where we were at. We were operating in the Cairns Port Douglas region. The little markers in yellow are our key sites. The little markers in blue are ones we're looking to expand into through the same operations. But in August this year, we actually launched our activity into the Whitsundays as well. That's the second major reef tourism hub for the Great Barrier Reef. The Whitsundays has a lot of different challenges compared to the Cairns Port Douglas in the far north. The Whitsundays was devastated by the series of cyclones, but most recently Cyclone Debbie in 2017. And that really created a very flat reef and a highly turbid reef with lots of sediment reef suspension and this has caused real challenges for us in thinking how do we apply our model to this new area?

Dave: [00:13:47] So as I said, we launched the program this year and the key questions were rather than can we just expand the network and plant lots of coral, it was really thinking, how do we take our approach, our workflows and our technologies and tailor them to even more challenging initial reef environments that have been hit by unprecedented impacts? And these are just some of the pictures, as you can see on the screen here. It's a beautiful place to work. We've really changed, for example, from floating nurseries to table nurseries. We actually now have changed planting coral from laying them flat on the reef to really standing them upright. Now, all of these workflows take a little bit longer than usual. So arguably our return on investment or effectiveness is perhaps a little bit cost effectiveness is perhaps a little bit lower. But the important thing with this project, it's about learning how to do things effectively. And so we're looking here at quality over quantity without question.

Dave: [00:14:48] The other part of advancing our network over the past 12 months or so has been thinking about the global footprint that we have somewhat unexpectedly materialised and the little device that we use, the cheap, low cost device that's used to reattach coral non-invasively has now been distributed to 19 countries worldwide, largely through trials. And this has made us realise that we've had a huge footprint in terms of exporting this Australian-led technology all around the world where there's huge interest amongst stakeholders to similarly adopt these these sorts of workflows and technologies. The other major win for us in terms of advancing our network and this again is through the Coral Clip technology has been integration into the Reef Joint Field Management Program. This is a program that's run through the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and it really is, if you can imagine, a sort of taskforce that's aimed as a first responder to the reef. So if there's a ship grounding or a storm, the field management program will come in and try and actively manage that site in real time and ensure that the right actions are taken. And Coral Clip has now been integrated into that program officially and we're currently developing how that will look into the future. So, the sorts of practices that started through a stakeholder-led vision in partnership with us here at UTS and the research has now had both a national and a global footprint that's been extremely exciting in seeing how some of these concepts have really captured the attention of others.

Dave: [00:16:23] One of the most exciting steps for us this year was attending the International Coral Restoration Conference. There's only been one held before and this was the Reef Restoration Conference was held in Key Largo. We actually had to deal with Hurricane Ian halfway through, which was a challenge in itself. But one of the exciting features of this event was the Coral Nurture Program had the opportunity to actively exchange ideas with the three other largest restoration programs in the world. So between the four of us, it was quite a unique opportunity to start testing how all our different methods into compare and where they might be best suited in different circumstances. It was a really unique event and one that has actually built long lasting relationships that we're looking to build into the future. The bottom right hand side is just an example of the sort of propagation that is undertaken in the Florida area, throughout the Caribbean, actually using these sorts of coral trees. And it's actually quite amazing when you dive through these coral trees, they are really like plantations. They're in their hundreds, some of these coral trees and they retain tens of thousands of coral at once. And it was really exciting to see the sort of scale that the the US partners were having to deal with. They have different sets of challenges, again, fewer species, but actually much more challenging environments than some of ours, believe it or not.

Dave: [00:17:52] And within that framework of building our practice on the reef and expanding our activity has of course been the role of our research. As I said, the Coral Nurture program itself is a unique partnership between tourism and research. That works synergistically. It actually acts as a positive feedback loop so that the more we learn in terms of how to do things bigger and better, the more the tourism operators are able to plant. And of course, the more information we get to be able to refine our research questions to do things bigger and better. So because of that, we've been advancing our science portfolio and it now really spans a huge range of activities and those are all listed here spanning everything from coral attachment biology all the way through to the socio economic impacts. And one of the things I'd like to do for the next few minutes is just share some examples of that science that we've really championed over the past 12 months and how it feeds through to inform our better practice.

Dave: [00:18:52] So the first example is, as you can see here, this is work championed by one of our PhD students, Isabelle. And what we've known for the last few years now is that our corals grow in our nurseries almost ten times faster than they do on the reef. And there's lots of reasons why that is, and I'm not going to go into those now. One of our concerns was just producing coral faster, make them of less quality? And what I mean by that is do they carry less resources for the things that would feed on them on the reef? And also, as they calcify and form a skeleton, that skeleton is critical to dissipate wave action and the role of reefs in coastal protection. But if we're growing corals faster and they're weaker, then they actually could have really low value in replanting them on the reef. So we were very concerned with these particular questions. So Isabelle conducted a 12 month study and really looked at lots and lots of fitness metrics of all of the corals on the nurseries compared to the reef. And what Isabelle was able to demonstrate was that the faster growing corals actually were as robust and as high quality as those on the reef. And in fact, in terms of some of the quality of material as a food source, arguably they were better. So this has been very exciting development showing that we can grow corals faster and that they're the same quality as corals that we grow on the reef.

Dave: [00:20:19] The second example has been really thinking about corals microbiomes. And this was another factor really that we were concerned with, I guess, where we were growing corals in nurseries. We have 120 nurseries now and really we're propagating corals at near agricultural scales. And of course, one of the big things you have to worry about in agriculture is pests and disease. Once you start thinking about monocultures especially, and many of our nurseries have restricted numbers of species on them. So one of the key questions that one of our other PhD students, Paige Strudwick, asked was do the microbiomes, the bacterial communities within our nursery corals, start to show signs of perhaps less desirable bacterial communities? And similarly, when we put them back on the reef, are we propagating some of those bacterial communities? And what Paige demonstrated was actually in the nurseries, the slightly different environments that the nurseries are in compared to the reef, actually nurture a very specific type of bacteria in some coral species community, I should say. And when we replant those corals back on the reef, they actually revert back very quickly to having the same bacterial communities on the reef. So actually what we've demonstrated is the microbiomes are very plastic and we believe that that plasticity is important in similarly aiding really, really healthy nursery growth and similar to the points we made in the previous slide.

Dave: [00:21:50] Some of the more ecological work that we've been involved with, and this is literally being published today, is one of our other PhD student, Christine Roper, was working on some very cool work demonstrating how planting small fragments tips the size frequency distribution of our populations. Now what I mean by that is when you look at a reef, there's always a certain number of small corals and a certain number of large corals, and that's really critical to the ecological balance of the reef in terms of how biomass and diversity is retained. One of the concerns we had through mass bleaching was that, of course once you die, once the large corals and adult corals die, they can't sexually reproduce. So what we call recruitment onto the reef has stalled. And that's a real worry because it means it's very hard to regain your large corals quickly. And that's why we use our asexual propagation practices with small fragments to overcome that bottleneck. And this is really what Christine's paper was able to demonstrate, that by planting lots of small fragments quickly, we can overcome this recruitment bottleneck and fast track recovery back to a reproductively viable population. The figure on the left hand side is actually some of the very first corals we planted as just single little fragments in 2019. They reproduce, they sexually reproduced for the first time last year, and that was that was a world first for us in demonstrating that the material we're repopulating back onto the reef is growing to the point at which it can self recover. And that's absolutely fantastic news. And again, earlier this week we checked these same colonies and they're ready to spawn again next week. So we're very excited to see a second generation of new recruits come through.

Dave: [00:23:38] And with that, that's everything I have to present to you today. I think I'm bang on my time, at least I hope I am. And at this point in time, I'd really like to welcome any questions. I hope it's stimulated lots of thoughts and lots of ideas going forward. And thank you once again for joining me on this very brief journey that we've had over the past 12 months. So thank you.

Alex: [00:23:58] Thank you, Dave. That was a fantastic presentation. So we had quite a few questions come through the Q&A. So I will try and get through as many as I can in the time that we've got. We've got quite a bit of time. I'm just going to pop these up. We've got a few, so I've got a couple of ones that have been uploaded, so I might start with those first, if that's okay.

Dave: [00:24:20] Course.

Alex: [00:24:22] So we've got a question here. What proportion of the Great Barrier Reef has been replanted with new coral?

Dave: [00:24:28] It's a great question, isn't it? Well, the proportion of the reef, it's sort of hard to say. It's a very small proportion. Part of the reason for that as well is that this is not a commercial activity at the moment. It is a research activity. We're still learning how can we do this effectively. That's the critical thing to realise. So with that in mind, the Coral Nurture Program focuses on 30 sites. And remember, tourism sites themselves only reflect 7% of all Great Barrier Reef sites. So it's an extremely small proportion and a small amount. But the goal is again is this is never intended to be deployed across the whole Great Barrier Reef. It's designed to be effective at strategic sites that have disproportionately high value. Now I've mentioned here tourism value, but when we think about high value sites, it may also be, for example, reefs that are positioned oceanographically to supply other reefs with larvae. So there's also sort of ecological values we can be strategic with. So at the moment, reef restoration itself is not conducted at many sites, but where it is conducted it is proven to be extremely effective to augment natural recovery.

Alex: [00:25:38] Fantastic. Thank you. So I might just flick now to some of the questions that were submitted ahead of time, just so I can get a bit of a mix. So we had a question that was submitted ahead. What does the future of coral research look like to you?

Dave: [00:25:54] That's a really interesting question. So, I think it's... Research in general recently has really reflected the shifting needle of management. I would say. So, although an example would be within future reason, within coronation programme, much of our research now is very much applied, so it's led by questions directly needing answers from our stakeholder partners within the Coral Nurture Program. However, that doesn't change any of the science we do. In fact, we still do exactly the same science. It's just that how we ask the questions has changed, has a much more applied sense, and I suspect that that is the future for research in general for coral reefs. Many researchers are still doing their core research, but it's embedded within these much more applied programs and importantly programs that are co-designed with the stakeholders. I think that's the other thing to remember is although as scientists we have what we believe are very good ideas, they're not always the ideas that are needed on the ground right now. Sometimes we're ahead of our time. So I think those sort of co-design research with stakeholders and the applied nature with which we conduct research is obviously becoming more common. Certainly funding landscapes are looking towards those sort of co-designed and stakeholder led applications as well. So the future of research is, I would say, evolving. But to be honest, we're not really doing anything we've ever not done before. And if anything, we're seeing that we're seeing the direct applications. It's extremely exciting and empowering as a scientist to see the impact in real time or near real time of the sort of science you're able to conduct. And I think that's true of many of our students in our group, for example, who have joined partly because, again, through even a PhD program, you can see the impact you're having almost immediately. It's extremely rewarding.

Alex: [00:28:04] All right. We have another question submitted. They want to know how does the Coral Clip actually work?

Dave: [00:28:12] I realised I glossed over this. It's a great question because we sort of described it last year a little bit. And I didn't have time to talk about it. But it's a small spring clip. And the way it works, I have a video, but I'm not going to dig it out now, unfortunately. But you simply hold the clip on one end. You hammer in... It's amazing how many people you learn don't know how to use a hammer, by the way, when you teach how to play with the Coral Clip. You hammer in the nail into the substrate and then you simply use the spring clip to wedge your coral fragment underneath it. And the reason that's important, the reason we designed that, is because the other way you can reattach corals onto a reef is using chemicals, glues and cements. And there's two problems with that. The first with chemicals is that you don't want to be pumping lots of chemicals on a reef. The second is within the tourism industry, there were some really hard health and safety walls of having chemicals on a boat with tourists. Much of our Coral Nurture Program activities integrate into the daily tourism operations. It's one of the reasons we're so cost effective. So we needed a sort of a non chemical based solution. So John Edmondson actually invented the Coral Clip. We're on, I think version six now. It's gone through various iterations. It costs about ten cents. So again, it's extremely accessible and it's why we've sent so many to our overseas partners are largely low to middle economy countries that are looking for low cost solutions. So the coral clip has been useful. Now, the question we always get in relation to that is what does the Coral clip sort of have a lasting impact as a foreign object on the reef? And the answer we like to say is, is no. It is a metal, so it corrodes over time. In fact, if you if you find an old coral clip with, say, for example, the corals died or fallen out, which occasionally happens, you can feel that the thin arm of the coral clip has become extremely brittle. So it naturally corrodes over time or is overgrown and engulfed by the coral. The little metal nail has a longer lasting legacy because it's embedded within the reef and it's slightly less biological and sort of the chemistry is different within the reef substrate. So that's why we're able to use the metal detector to find the nails and not the clips. What we've learnt recently, and it's a hypothesis we're working on related to this, is that certain metals we believe may actually aid coral survival. And so there's a prevailing hypothesis certain metals are needed for not just corals, but other organisms to build stress tolerance molecules within their metabolic machinery. And one of the questions we're testing now is whether the the additional metal that's provided through Coral Clip might actually be a benefit in providing some additional stress tolerance. So it's 'watch this space' time. It's part of our sort of wider research portfolio as well.

Alex: [00:31:16] Great. Thank you. It's got another question. How do you encourage or can you indeed encourage artificial spawning or foster coral growth?

Dave: [00:31:26] Really a good way to start with that. I'll try not to make this too long an answer because it can probably be a very long answer, but some I'll start off with the first part. So can you encourage corals to spawn? Some very cool research has now actually developed into a spin off company in the UK, and what these researchers were able to do was by fine tuning over an annual cycle the lighting, you can actually shift the timing of spawning. So they've had, for example, Great Barrier Reef corals in London and got them to spawn at different times of year. And so now what this company is able to do is say have 12 tanks. Each tank is set up to spawn in a different month. And so theoretically you can produce larvae, you can get corals to sexually reproduce year round. So it's a really, really exciting development thinking about how do we better promote the sexual reproduction phase for restoration activities. So there's a lot of work in that space all around the world, but primarily there's some, for example, with aims, there's some in other countries where they're now trialling these systems to promote more reproduction over time. Obviously you can't really get the same coral to spawn multiple times throughout the year because it is an energetic cost to the coral. So obviously it's a stress. So one thing you're very mindful of is that although you want multiple spawns, you don't want more from the same coral, hence multiple times.

Dave: [00:32:57] The other thing that was asked was can you encourage coral to grow faster? On the reef, that's a really challenging question because the coral is subjected to a series of predators. There's lots and lots of grazers around. However, what we discovered in the nurseries, I mentioned that we were able to grow them ten times faster on the reef. That's primarily because the little corallivores are not brave enough to venture out from the reef on to our nurseries. The second is that the higher flow rates that the coral nurseries sit in just adjacent to the reef seem to provide the corals with more opportunity to feed. So we we often see, in fact this is very common, that the coral polyps are extended on the coral nurseries during the daytime. That's really unusual on the reef because of course coral predators are looking to snip off and eat those little polyps that are extended. Of course, again, on the nursery, those predators are not there or are not there as high abundance. So the corals are able to actively feed during the day. There's other factors, sort of physical factors that also age that faster growth on the nurseries. But as I said, by being able to use nurseries not only to rebuild biomass quickly, but do so, generating material quality has been a real game changer for us, and especially for the operator partners who are now replanting at such scales that the access to material actually starts to become the bottleneck very quickly.

Alex: [00:34:28] Great. Thanks, Dave. We have quite a few questions coming in about some of the different environmental and anthropogenic impacts that are, I guess, affecting corals. So people wanting to know things about are microplastics or microscopic plastics damaging to corals? Is temperature the biggest thing that's likely to impact corals? And what are the types of things that can be done to help mitigate some of those really big environmental and other stresses?

Dave: [00:34:59] Yeah, that's a big subject. That's a great question, really. The, you know, the biggest factor we have to deal with, of course, is climate emission, climate gas emissions. Ocean, I should say global warming for, using the generic term, is really, really problematic for reefs. Many of you will know all about this, but the process of having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or more methane or other gases is threefold for coral reefs. The first is a process called ocean warming. The second is a process called ocean acidification. The last is a process called ocean deoxygenation. So all of those act together. And in fact, ocean warming itself is perhaps the biggest of the three because it does two things. The first is it really is the key driver of why we're seeing coral mortality at scale through mass bleaching and anomalously warm conditions. And as an example, this year we had the first bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef during a La Nina year where it's supposed to be cooler than average, but yet the waters were still anomalously warm. The other thing ocean warming does is that it also amplifies ocean deoxygenation. As you can imagine, warmer oceans are able to hold less gas. Oxygen is a critical gas for survival, as you might imagine, for any organism, any aerobic organism. It's why oxygen therapy is used in medicine, for example, to aid recovery post-surgeries. So ocean warming itself amplifies all these other stressors. So it is our biggest concern and being able to mitigate that is our absolute priority if we are to have reefs into the future.

Dave: [00:36:46] The other thing, of course, is all stressors that act synergistically or interactively. And so whether it's local pollution, spanning microplastics or herbicides, pesticides, oil, coal, runoff, you name it, all of those have an impact. Probably one of the and I'm not going to say too much about this, but one of the perhaps most controversial out there is sunscreen. There's a lot of lobbying to, for example, produce reef-friendly sunscreens, which is great. Any less chemical on the reef is important, but the scientific evidence for sunscreens' impact on corals is still, the jury is still very much out. In fact, there's very little evidence at play at the moment. And that's something to be extremely mindful of when you're making your choices to visit the reef. We always use reef friendly sunscreen because we feel it's the right thing to do to have less chemicals. But also you need to do your homework in terms of the real effect it's having. The other question really pointed to microplastics, and there's growing evidence demonstrating that corals and other organisms actually bioaccumulate microplastics into both tissues and skeletons. The cost this has on corals is still a little bit unknown. But the way I look at this and I think other researchers are probably really pursuing this much more actively than I am. And Jen Mathews actually here at UTS has done quite a bit of work on plastics and microplastics, has again, any sort of foreign body or stressor comes with an added energetic cost for coral and any energetic cost comes with the penalty of being able to not resist other stressors that it has to deal with.

Dave: [00:38:30] So the more we can mitigate anything, the better. And I know we focus on climate change mitigation as the key stressor because we should. We have to. We also need to be mindful that any other stressor amplifies on the reef. So any action we take is absolutely critical, whether it is reduce straws or reduce plastics, use reef friendly sunscreen, restore reefs. All of it has a role to play in ensuring we're minimising our stress impacts. And of course that is more evident than ever as we have such a large footprint on the reef. What was really mind blowing this year was the paper that was produced that demonstrated we now have a billion dependent humans on earth relying on healthy reefs for their survival. We used to use the statistic half a million for the last ten years. A new census demonstrated that was vastly underestimated. So pretty much. One in seven people on the planet rely on a healthy reef to survive. And at the moment we need to do everything we can to ensure we have reefs into the future for that survival. And in many cases, many communities do not have time for us to solve climate change at the rate that our politicians and governance is able to commit to.

Alex: [00:39:52] I'm conscious of time and there's quite a few questions coming through, so we might do a bit of a quick-fire round.

Dave: [00:39:58] I like it. Okay, I'll keep it short and sweet.

Alex: [00:40:01] Okay, so there's lots of correlated questions. So really quickly, how many types of coral are there?

Dave: [00:40:09] Upwards of 650 for the Great Barrier Reef. Used to be 650 species, but new molecular tools demonstrate that that's probably underestimated by a factor of one or two.

Alex: [00:40:20] And who knows what mutants are out there?

Dave: [00:40:22] Who knows what mutants are out there? So it's cool. New science that we have going on in our group is finding new species.

Alex: [00:40:30] Awesome. What is your favourite type of coral?

Dave: [00:40:33] One that is alive!

Alex: [00:40:35] Lots of people wanting to know how to get involved. So if there was one thing that people could do walking away today to help the reef and reef restoration, what would it be?

Dave: [00:40:44] Please visit the reef. I think the critical thing is go and see how fantastic the reef is and by going to see the reef with the operator partners within the Coral Nurture program, of course you are contributing to how they can better steward the reef site. So that's of course one option. The other option is do everything you can to lower your emissions, lower your stress footprints onto the reef.

Alex: [00:41:06] If someone wanted to study the reef, get involved from a studying or job perspective, what would you recommend that they do?

Dave: [00:41:13] I would recommend get involved in being a part of current reef activities any way you can, whether that's through volunteering for reef-relevant activities or getting some work experience within some of the reef industries. Pretty much reef science spans everything from biological engineering to social science. So whatever science you decide to do, there's a role for it within improving the health of our reefs.

Alex: [00:41:35] Great. If people wanted to get involved and volunteer, is there something else they could do as well?

Dave: [00:41:42] Unfortunately, at the moment we're in a bit of a ... Sorry, this is where I get a bit of a long answer. The answer is it's difficult to actively volunteer within the Coral Nurture Program at the moment because it's set up as a research permit. But we are working with the authorities to transition it into a different type of permit where volunteers can can contribute.

Alex: [00:42:01] So watch this space, but in the meantime, go and visit the reef and see as much as you can.

Dave: [00:42:05] Absolutely. Absolutely. Please, please be involved.

Alex: [00:42:06] We have two more questions that came through. I'll end on that one as the last one. So we've got opportunities for people, things they can do. I should just end with this last question because I think it's a great one to finish with. So there was a science teacher that submitted a question that they're very hopeful for the impact that the next generation of students, young people, next generation scientists can have on coral reefs. What is the thing that you are most optimistic about for the future?

Dave: [00:42:42] I'm definitely most optimistic in that everyone I'm seeing coming through of a certain generation really wants to be more actively involved. I think in the past we believe that solving the problems of our reef were lobbying for climate change, which itself is an active process, but being actually able to get involved and actively contribute to reef recovery and management is really, really important part of it. And I'm optimistic because we're seeing that these are having a real effect. It's not something that we are just throwing around as a bandaid or an option. It really is something that has both an ecological impact but also a social impact as well.

Alex: [00:43:24] Fantastic. So in any way, shape or form that people can get involved, it really does have an impact.

Dave: [00:43:29] It really does. You should be optimistic that if you do something, it is helping.

Alex: [00:43:35] Amazing. That's, I think, a perfect note to end on, Dave. So thank you so much for the lively and informative panel discussion today. Thank you to everyone who attended and submitted questions. One last thing, Dave. If people want to visit and know updates about the research from Coral Nurture or from yourself, where can they find you? Where can they find that information?

Dave: [00:43:52] Yeah, the best place, we update the website monthly, so please go to the Coral Nurture Program website if it's something you specifically want to see about Coral Nurture Program activity, but otherwise don't hesitate to follow us on Twitter. Email us if you have specific questions about either this program or the wider research within Future Reefs.

Alex: [00:44:10] Fantastic. We'll send a copy of today's talk along with this Q&A to everyone who registered and it will be on our website very soon. Thank you again for all attending. We hope you are leaving inspired and feel like you can make a big impact on the coral reef. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: [00:44:24] Thanks, Alex, and thanks everyone for coming on today.

Hello and welcome to UTS Science in Focus, a free public lecture series that showcases the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Dr Lucy Buxton and I have the pleasure of being the moderator for today's session. Today is World Science Day, an annual event that's celebrated around the globe that highlights the significant role of science in society and the need to engage in wider public debates on emerging scientific issues. It also underscores the role scientists play in broadening our understanding of the remarkable fragile planet we call home. Coral reefs are among some of the world's most important ecosystems, providing natural habitat for millions of species, protecting our coastal cities and adding millions of dollars into our global economy. But coral reefs are at risk from climate change, environmental stress and other factors. Even if we could abate climate change and reduce ocean warming tomorrow, many stakeholders want to rebuild what has already been lost. There may not be a silver bullet, but reef restoration is an important aid, and the innovations being produced today are bringing down the cost and increasing scale daily. There's considerable effort around the world to protect and restore coral reefs and support the communities that rely on them. Protecting the reefs brings together diverse stakeholders and experts from science, business, industry and community. Today, we're joined by four fantastic speakers to explore their perspectives from across science and economics and community on the restoration practices that are being developed and the positive impact it's having right now to protect these incredible ecosystems. Before I introduce the speakers today, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands.

I'd also like to pay respect to elders past and present, acknowledging them as traditional custodians of knowledge on this land. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. With this being an online event, do bear with us if we have any technical issues, we'll work to resolve them as quickly as possible. If you find at any stage you're not able to talk, to access the talk at any point, please try logging out and logging back in again. If you have any questions during today's panel, we encourage you to type those into the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel and we'll do our best to answer those at the end of the talk. If you like a question someone else has asked and would like it to be answered, please use the upvoting tool, which is the little thumbs up symbol next to the question itself. This session will be recorded, but we will not be recording any video or audio input from the audience. You may contact UTS at science.future@uts.edu.au to discuss any concerns or questions you may have. Ok, so onto today's speakers, our first speaker today is Professor David Suchet. Dave is a highly cited marine biologist interested in understanding how coral and how environments and climate shape the form and function of coral reef ecosystems. Professor in the Climate Change Cluster at UTS, Dave increasingly works alongside industry and tourism sectors to improve reef management and practices and, his work was recognised in 2020 with a UTS Medal for research impact.

Following Dave, we'll hear from Dr Emma Kamp. Emma is an award-winning and internationally renowned coral expert who is passionate about both the protection of coral reefs and the involvement of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We'll, then hear from Mel Edwards. Mel is the director of the Executive MBA program at the UTS Business School and also the research director at the Centre for Business and Sustainable Development. She researches and teaches about sustainability, sustainable enterprise and responsible management, as well as complexity theory and social impact. Her work draws across disciplines with an overarching aim to understand how people organize, learn and adapt to enable sustainable transitions. Our fourth speaker today is Jonny Gaskill with an early career focus in marine life education, Jonny completed not one but two bachelor's degrees in marine science and education, leading to the publication of a number of books and digital resources. In more recent years, Jonny shifted his focus to the protection of coral reefs while working and living in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Applying his knowledge of coral reefs throughout the Great Barrier Reef, he's then co-ordinated a number of local reef recovery initiatives and aims to use his observations to determine the best possible actions that will be needed to be taken to help preserve coral in the Whitsundays. I'll now hand over to our first speaker, Professor David Target.

Thank you, Lucy. It gives me great pleasure to initiate this series of brief presentations by really asking the question and answering the question why reef restoration? What makes it viable for management and why has it become such a hot topic for us that have been researching and working on coral reefs for decades and really to answer those questions we really need to place ourselves in the situation that reefs are facing increasingly by the day. We now know that coral reef futures are increasingly dire under climate change unless we can limit warming to well below one and a half degrees and consequently efforts to manage reefs using existing platforms, which typically comprise protection of areas but also mitigation of local threats, are simply not enough to stem the tide of increasing climate pressures. And this particular problem is not lost on the nearly half a billion people that are dependent on coral reefs to survive. And you only have to go as far as Indonesia. This example here really demonstrates how local communities, local subsistence communities have really had to take action into their own hands to rebuild reefs that have been decimated by blast fishing. So whilst this isn't an example from climate change, it is an example from climate change related processes, overpopulation and simply unsustainable use of reefs. And quite simply, in this case, protection of reefs just simply loses the very values that reefs bring to local communities.

The same kind of context really applies in Australia, where our reefs have unprecedented cultural and ecological value. But importantly, they also have an economic value, and that economic value is largely driven by reef tourism. And so about three or four years ago, the same idea where we were rapidly losing reefs in front of our eyes and the local communities simply wanted to have more power to support stewardship based activities, to rebuild the reefs in real-time and really rehabilitate and maintain the good parts of the reef. So this is an example here where we've been working with reef tourism, launching a program called the Coral Nurture Program, and this was really to try and galvanize momentum amongst industry to play a part in rebuilding reefs and securing not just their own industry values, but, of course, the ecological values of the reef. All of these efforts, whether they are from subsistence fishing or whether they're from tourism industries again has not been lost on the global community and actually this has been a hugely facilitated in the last year or so through the UN, who launched the ecosystem, the decade of ecosystem restoration that started in June this year. And importantly, the idea is to start galvanizing all of this accelerating action worldwide, where local communities are really working hard to preserve their own reef systems on their doorstep. And importantly, this is also to try and similarly collate and align a lot of the interest in investing into these reef restoration activities, whether it's from governments or corporate foundations.

And collectively, the action and investment can start to build a much more coherent picture with which the success of restoration can be executed. So when we talk about reef restoration, however, it's not as simple necessarily as just planting coral. And consequently, I think the term reef restoration is quite often synonymised or confused, if you like, with sort of antiquated approaches to try and garden the reef. And what we actually have now is this huge diversity of tools that are developing, whether it's in the in the top left hand side of this slide through new structures to help consolidated, to help consolidate reef or whether it's in the right hand side, really working with the fact that corals not only reproduce by fragmenting and asexually growing, but also they sexually reproduce via larvae every year. All of these different methods can play a role in a part in this sort of more collective approach to restoring our coral reefs. So really, we're turning to the initial question that we asked, and how is reef restoration a viable management option? Well, there's really four simple ingredients to this. And actually, Emma, Mel and Johnny will really take you on a journey through these four steps. But really, just to outlay these, the first is we need scale. And quite simply, this means we need practices that are easy to adopt and also the finance routes that are straightforward to enable that adoption to deliver scale.

They, of course, have to be viable. They have to deliver what we term ecosystem service outcomes to ensure what we do actually carries a benefit to not just the stakeholders, but the ecosystem itself. And importantly, an action that we've really understood very well in recent years is that it's got to be proactive. By working together, we can actually start to make a difference, just like climate change as a collective problem. Restoration is a collective aid. And then finally, what's critical and Lucy mentioned this at the beginning is that the reef restoration process itself is not a replacement for management. It's a tool that can augment under the right circumstances to make a difference. And all of this has collectively come together as an example recently through our Coral Nurture program, where we demonstrated in recent years because of COVID 19 and tourism downturns that actually tourism industry that's equipped with capacity to rehabilitate the reefs through coral propagation and other restoration type tools can actually retain their asset values, their trained staff and be resilient to future uncertainty. So with that in mind, I'm now going to pass to Emma, and Emma will start to explain some of the scientific processes that we need in place to ensure that we can deliver these these facets.

Thank you, Dave, and I'm going to be speaking today about what the role is of science in the restoration space. Now, a lot of restoration activities have been around for decades, and have often been initiated by practitioners with less involvement from science. But as climate change and biodiversity loss increases around the globe, we are understanding that whilst we fundamentally have to address climate change, that alone is unlikely to be enough and that we also need to use nature-based solutions and start to restore nature to give the best chance of surviving through the future. So that means that we need science involved in this process to ensure that we are utilizing nature and its most efficient form to ensure it has the best chance to build its resilience to future change. So we can think then, that science got three key roles that it can play within the restoration space, first and foremost, is protection. Then it's to actually look at how we restore what are the different methods that make most sense for the local site that we're looking at. And importantly, then knowing that the climate is going to continue to change, the environment is dynamic, and there will be unforeseen impacts as well as foreseen impacts, how can we best prepare this system to have the best chance of future survival and the collective effort of all of this, and really where science is key, is that it wants to maximize success of the efforts that are being undertaken.

And that's really important. We need to understand what is success, because success at one site may not be the same as success at another site, and an example for this could be if there's a ship grounding or some local damage, there may be a very small area that needs to be restored. If a certain area has lost a certain species, then then rehabilitating that one species is very different to say, what we're seeing for areas on the Great Barrier Reef where because of coral bleaching, we've lost quite large areas of reef that requires a different approach. And so this is where science can come in to try and tailor what is needed to maximize the success. And that's ultimately ensuring that the ecosystem has gone back to a state where it has its ecosystem function, the biodiversity and the resilience to future change. So, in protection then, one of the big things that science can do is help us to understand when and where we should protect. We can see three very different reefs seascapes here. One of them is likely beyond repair and it's, you know, there's there's no coral there, it's very, it's not an obvious flat area where we can look at, say, something like larval seeding. And given the effort and energy to look into restoration, we have to be very strategic over the areas where we intervene. On the other side of the spectrum, there are reefs that are still amazingly diverse and have great coral cover. And again, here it wouldn't be appropriate necessarily to intervene because nature is doing well. But in between those, we have sites where there is available space for things like outplanting corals or larval seeding that could use benefit from restoration efforts. So a key part of science is choosing when and where we intervene.

Next, then we have to understand, we picked our site, but what is the best method to use? And Dave touched on a few of these, and it's really highly variable depending on the needs of the sites. So there can be things like larval seeding, where the larval slick is collected and could be transferred to a site where actually there isn't enough natural stock to support natural recovery. Then if there are, say, certain species that needed to be targeted, that's where actually having in-situ nurseries can be really beneficial. So you can then target the individuals that you want to grow up so you can see at the bottom of the screen there's some corals growing up in nursery frames. And this is something that the coral nuture program has been using successfully out in the Great Barrier Reef. And then in some locations, if there isn't available substrate or, for example, after a cyclone, there could be a lot of rubble, then having a structure such as the middle top, you can see where there are actually spiders or frames that can help consolidate the substrate can help provide a base for coral attachment. So again, understanding with practitioners the needs of the sites and in tailoring the scientific and innovative solutions to do that is again another way that science can get involved and contribute to the restoration space.

A really crucial thing that we have to do within the science space is to choose what corals and where we source them from. So this is just a really simplified view of biodiversity. We've got branching corals. We've got boulder corals. And what we choose has different functions to the reef when we out-plant them. Branching corals produce a great 3D structure for fish habitats, but they're more susceptible to storm damage. Whereas the slower, grow, boulder corals may provide less structural complexity, but it may be more resilient to future change. So understanding which corals we out-plant can impact the biodiversity and the functioning of the reef, and that's something we need to understand through the science is what we should be choosing. And also then where those corals come from. So there's two examples here. There are natural sources of broken corals that we can utilize, and that just rebuilds the populations that are naturally there. But again, as mentioned before, we can start to select individual species, build these up, and that gives us a greater abundance and stocks we're not having to take from the environment. Now in these two pictures here, both of those have 100 percent coral cover, but one of them is a monoculture of the same coral species, whereas the other has many different species.

And so again, understanding what we out-plant and where is really important to ensure that we are producing a biodiverse reef that has the functions such as storm protection, such as housing for fishes that we need to ensure the reef's viability. The final thing then to touch on is that we need to ensure the reefs are persisting into the future. We have yet to deal with climate change, and there's a variety of different approaches that are being considered to try and ensure reefs have the best viable future. So this can be things like actually selecting the most tolerant corals from the reef, super corals for example, building these up in nurseries and out planting those. It can be relocating corals from, you know, more tolerant areas to less tolerant areas to boost that resilience and then exploring things like probiotics, synthetic biology and looking at naturally trying to assist the evolution of corals to give them the best chance in the future. All of these have different costs and risks associated with them, which we have to consider when implementing them. And on that note, I'm going to pass over to Mel, who's going to talk to us about some of the costs and things that we have to think about, ensuring that there's a sustainable approach to financing reef restoration activities.

I'm very pleased to be here and be part of this discussion. This is some early stage work that I've been doing in collaboration with colleagues in the business school, particularly Dr Deb Cotton. You might be wondering actually why the business community and why do we have business academics involved in this discussion around reef restoration? And as I'm going to explain in my presentation very briefly, reef restoration and biodiversity restoration more broadly is a risk for everyone. As Dave said at the beginning, it's a collective issue and therefore it requires collective solutions. But more importantly, you know, climate and biodiversity risk are becoming an increasingly material risk for the business and investment community. And so businesses are increasingly understanding their interdependency with the system and their safe habitat for operating business is important, and therefore they have a responsibility to both pay for the crisis and mitigate risk, but also to contribute towards the solutions in terms of restoration. And as we will also see the risk turning into responsibility is important not only just for businesses, but for society, more broadly and for the economy. So what do I mean by this? Well, the first thing we need to do is understand that the reef and ecosystems more broadly have a value. Now, some people might be really concerned when they see dollar signs on nature, particularly for those of us who might think this means nature or the environment can be put up for sale. But in the business way of thinking about valuation of natural capital, there's been a long history of understanding the contribution that these sometimes undervalued ecosystem services play in contributing to our very basic economic activities.

So there've been a number of different studies over many years that have looked at valuing ecosystems. In particular, the ones up here and the numbers I have on-screen relate to a couple of studies that have looked at the Great Barrier Reef in particular and the figures here from a study from Deloitte Economics. Also the total valuation of the reef in terms of its social and economic value mirrors a figure that was previously determined by Oxford Economics. So let me just take you briefly through what we have here. So there's a number of different ways of doing this valuation. One is to actually value the ecosystems themselves for their value that they contribute, and there are methods for doing this, but they have not been as well integrated into the business community. The ones that have been well integrated relate to what we might consider ESG or environmental, social and governance factors being implemented or embedded within economic and financial ways of determining the value of materials and also services. So in this case, we've got the direct economic value of reef activity could be valued at around $6.4 billion to the Australian economy, this takes into account the scientific and research community that we've just been discussing now, as well as the tourism activity, commercial fishing and aquaculture, recreational activities more broadly and also across the board of these activities. That's roughly equivalent to 64000 jobs, and that's pre-pandemic. Another way of looking at that is a much broader valuation, which you can see with the price tag over here on the reef of $56 billion.

Now this valuation takes into account not only those direct values that we draw from the use of and our direct benefit of the reef, but also the kind of social value as an iconic heritage site. What that means for future generations and what people, even if they wouldn't go to the reef or visit the reef, put a price on the value of that reef as an iconic value for Australia. So you can see that the reef does certainly have economic value. But as we know and as our science colleagues have been telling us, this value is being eroded and this is why it's very important for the business community and for the sustainable finance and investing community in particular, to work closely with scientists to understand where the big opportunities, not just from a risk perspective, but where are the opportunities to redirect finance for the types of projects that will have the most benefit, both in terms of restoration of the reef, but also in terms of that social and economic development in those local communities whose livelihoods are dependent upon a healthy and functioning reef. So we also know that this opportunity is something that investors are looking for. So there is a movement in the finance and investment community towards sustainable investing RIAA in their recent report, where they looked at the thematic concerns for investors.

So where do investors want to see their money go? The main thematic concern was still climate. However, 21 per cent of people said that the investment in natural capital of the kind that we're discussing here is an important consideration for where they would like to see their money going so we can see that there is an opportunity. But to date, most of the funding that has gone towards projects of ecosystem restoration, more broadly ocean conservation and in this case, reef restoration still comes from philanthropic sources from funds, grants, donations, sponsorships and endowments and government funding. These are really important mechanisms, and there are a lot of really wonderful initiatives that have been able to benefit from these sources of funding. But the problem remains that we have a gap between those funding sources and the total amount of capital that is required to restore the reef now, and also in the future going forward, if we can't mitigate some of the more dramatic effects of climate. So where are these solutions going to come from? And we know that for large scale investment to move into activities like reef restoration, there needs to be scale of viable, you know, reef activities that investors still look for a return on their investments. So this is necessary. So there might be some opportunities within reef restoration for this, and this is something that we're exploring in our research, not only just to understand the loss and mitigating the risk. Currently, there are instruments that are developed from banks, for example, and the insurance sector to ensure that in an event of crisis, risks can actually be insured.

But we also want to think about what are the restoration opportunities and how can we think about the multiplier effect of investing into reef restoration for that economic activity more broadly? But perhaps it's not always the big solutions that we need to be looking at, and it is a complex picture. So as you know, both of our scientists have told us, the solutions are small scale as well, and there is an opportunity to look at these small scale opportunities and to then think about the way that they can generate the livelihood of that reef. The business models that are being used by these smaller operatives are not necessarily the same as we might see in the corporate or business sector. There is an opportunity here to explore social enterprises, for example, where the revenues generated can be put back into the reef restoration activities or put back into the science and also stay within the local communities. There's opportunities to develop partnerships with the local tourism providers so that they can understand the science as well, work with scientists, work with those tourists and develop a partnership approach to looking at sustainable development of reef restoration. And on that note, I'm going to hand over to Johnny, who is going to talk us through some of these exciting activities that are happening at the moment up in the Whitsunday area.

Thanks, Mel. Well, good afternoon everybody to World Science Day. Following on from what Mel was just saying, I've been working on a couple of projects here in the Whitsundays, where the collaboration with local community and tourism operators, traditional owners has been really the most important factor in ensuring that these projects continue on. So as the Reef Islands Initiative Coordinator I've been looking at some of the old, some of the projects that have been underway over the last couple of years and then are working on a few new exciting initiatives in the future, working with tourism operators, community and even tourists. There's been obviously a lot of changes in the Great Barrier Reef and living in the Whitsundays on a little small island on the western side of those islands, you can see there, Daydream Island over the last seven years, I've been able to see a lot of changes, some good changes, some recovery. But the most significant was certainly the impact from the six to seven metre cyclonic waves that came from Cyclone Debbie. On this map here, you can see any of those green areas that hit the edge of the islands where the fringing reefs were, we lost. We went from about 70 to 80 per cent coral cover down to five to eight per cent coral cover. And unfortunately, these were the exposed sites. They were the sites that are generally good for coral growth and have healthy coral reefs, and they were also our primary tourism sites.

So over the next couple of years, we did see some recovery, but it's been very slow. The impact you can see here, this is where I was living one of my favourite little spots to jump in each night and hang out with the fish. It went from about an 80 per cent coral cover reef. This is a reef flat, so it's a bit more soft coral. But there's also branching corals a little bit deeper at the site to an algae garden. And it still looks like that today, and it just demonstrates the power of the waves. This photo here not only did it take out soft corals, which are fairly tough and hardy, but it even was able to damage the body tissue of corals that remained in place to the point where they weren't able to survive. So that, as well as the fact that we have some water quality issues in the Whitsundays, has been a big challenge for the region to recover. You can see there on the left, this is pre cyclone because I wanted to show even pre cyclone the water quality issues locally were there. It's not just a result of the cyclone washing a whole heap of sediment down, which is down the rivers into the area, which did happen. There's been a build up of sediment and high nutrients for many, many years for a number of reasons land clearing, dredging and vegetation loss, even on the islands as well.

So the problem now is these reefs are really struggling to recover on their own. On the right there, you can see Daydream Island, the western side reef covered in branching aquapora, and there's some plate corals in there as well. It was about 70 percent coral cover. And then last year, which is the same as what it's like today, it's really undergone a complete phase shift to an algal garden. And those areas where Coral would normally recruit, where the algae isn't, they're covered in turf algae and sediment. So it's making it extremely hard for these areas to recover. Another limitation, unfortunately, we have experienced in the Whitsundays was last year we had the first bleaching event that I'd witnessed in the eight years that I've been here during was actually during COVID, so not many people actually got out to see it. But living on the island, we were able to get around and survey a number of the hard corals sites that remained after Cyclone Debbie, and there was about an 80 per cent bleaching rate in hard coral cover. And some of you may not have seen many photos during this bleaching event in Whitsundays, because there was barely anyone out there. Technically was locked down, but this was work, so we were able to whizz around and check the sites.

We did see recovery. Luckily, there was a storm that came through in March that you can see on the graph where water temperature dropped dramatically, but it took about four weeks for those corals to start to recover after the temperature dropped below the 30 degree mark in the water. So there was some coral mortality and had the storm come through a week later, we may have lost a higher percentage, and there is only a few of these hard coral dominant sites left in the Whitsundays at the moment. So the projects we started working on after realising that maybe we need to intervene here, look at the recovery is so limited, there's so many impacts that are hindering recovery naturally. A few projects started in 2019. The project I led was the ex-situ nurseries on Daydream Island, and these were the first ex-situ nurseries with a primary focus of restoration in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The goal here was to involve tourists, so because it was out of the water, tourists are actually able to come onto the island and be part of the propagation process. The in-situ nurseries at Hook Island, they were put in the water at the same time, and Emma touched on some of the in-situ nurseries and the techniques around that method of restoration. This involved the local community, so this was trying to get the local community and more invested in restoration through volunteering.

And more recently, we have a larval reseeding project underway here at the moment, with AIMS and Southern Cross University as part of the Reef Islands Initiative. And this is using the tourism operators and traditional owners. So by trying to invest in tourists, getting involved, the community get involved, the tourism operators and the traditional owners. We're hoping that this will allow these projects to go or remain ongoing. I'm just going to go into a little bit of detail not too long on some of the projects so you can get a bit of a case study on how they work. Emma was mentioning super corals as well during their presentation, the donor corals for the Daydream Island ex-situ nurseries are taken from the marina there. That was the only area in the mall group or around Daydream Island, where no corals were impacted by the cyclone. So the marina actually helped us in that way, and because the water's warmer inside the marine and the corals are much more resilient and hopefully can do or recover or sustain longer in a changing climate. Getting the tourists involved so you can see there bottom left, some of the tourists were able to get involved. The Daydream Island continues to run these tours. It's a free tour where guests to the island can come and learn about coral restoration and get involved in the propagation process, working with one of the marine biologists on board.

And just this is an example of why we do it. Coral reefs do naturally recover on their own. It does take a long time, but the struggle around these inshore islands, with the added impacts of water quality and also the impacts of bleaching, we are seeing much slower recovery on the left there. You can see that that control bommie that's going with Daydream Island is covered in algae and then on the right you can see the out-plants that have come from the nursery. Hopefully, the idea is that the out-plants continue to grow, block the light from where the algae is growing and then slowly will start to get grazing herbivores back with fish that eat the algae and start to phase shift that back to a coral reef. Because this bommie was completely covered in coral pre cyclone, and four years later, they're still showing very limited recruitment. In-situ nurseries, I won't go too much into too much detail and or into limited detail on these, but basically they're ex-situ nurseries in-situ in the water, collecting corals attaching to cement discs, and they're out-planting them onto the reef and the out-planting process involved members of the community during this project. Larval reseeding project is really getting these tourism operators involved, and the project we're working on locally is called Boats for Coral, and that's using tourism operator boats to do the work.

So inviting tourism operators to come out and the way it works is you collect coral spawn after the coral spawn slick forms on the top of the water. The tourism boats go around with buckets and nets, collect the spawn and put them into these larval pools, and they stay there for six days or so, and then the eggs hatch, form into larvae, develop into larvae and then they're deployed on to damage reef. So you can see here we've involved the traditional owners this year, which has been great. Some of the owners came down and did a smoke ceremony to welcome the tourism operators to their region and there's five traditional owners that have been coming out and are staying on the mother ship with us at the end of this month. So that will mean that the traditional owners are totally involved and will actually become part of the project. A lot of these traditional owners haven't been back to country for a long time, so they're coming down from north of Townsville to their country that they haven't seen, which is amazing. The tourism operator involvement you can see down the bottom here, it's ocean rafting, one of the tourism operators driving along. That's Professor Peter Harrison at the front is collecting coral spawn, and then top right Redcape is moving the coral, the larval pools around to deploy them onto the reef.

And you can see that at the bottom of how that process works. So these early projects, these three early projects using or working with operators, community groups and everyone locally has been one of the driving forces of the Whitsunday Reef Islands initiative. And we had a workshop earlier this year and brought everyone together. Basically discuss what worked, what didn't. Looked at the baseline mapping data that was produced by University of Queensland, which is where that cyclone map came from, and determine which sites would be the ideal sites for restoration based on water quality, the likelihood of cyclones coming through and damaging it again, and which sites are less likely to recover on their own because of poor connectivity as larval sinks. So we are at the stage now where we're getting, you know, getting a lot of information that's helping guide restoration in the future locally. But at the end of the day, it's really these sites that are unable to recover that we're focusing on and trying to work with everyone. So hopefully it can be sustainable. And this is, just thought I'd put a picture of plaque. This is one of the sites from the top side of that island where the fringing is that's been totally wiped out, almost totally wiped out by the waves came from Cyclone Debbie. And that is me. Thank you very much, everyone.

Thank you so much, Johnny. And thank you very much to all of our presenters today. What a fascinating and inspiring set of talks. So just a reminder we're now going to move into the Q&A section and we've already received some fantastic questions through the Q&A function. If you'd still like to submit a question, please feel free to do so using the Q&A chat. I'm now going to ask all of our presenters to come back on screen and we'll tackle some of these, these great questions that have come through today. So Emma, I'm going to ask you the first one, one that came through from our initial registration. You touched on this a little bit before about the super corals and transplanting. And Johnny, you just mentioned it about the marina and the waters being warmer. But the question that we've received is is it possible to transplant more robust corals from outside Australia, from other coral reefs and transplant them onto the reef in Australia? So in theory, it could be possible, but there's a lot of complexities, even moving corals within a reef in different locations within a reef itself. So the first thing there's international permits, things to think about and then beyond that, just the biology itself. The corals are really well adapted to the environment that they're raised in, and that's one of the reasons that they're so successful. So we often find that even moving corals locally, things like the natural differences in light, the sedimentation can impact things like the bacteria, the type of algae that associate with the coral, and all of that affects how well it survives. So although it's not impossible at this stage, it's something that is probably highly unlikely, and the efforts would more be looking at locally which corals are there that could be potentially moved that are already resilient within the location where they found. Fantastic. Thank you, Emma and Johnny, an extension of that question from one of our audience members. Do corals establish more effectively when the larva are captured than they would naturally. It was one of those slides that you explained about all of the different ways that you're using restoration practices.

Yeah. So I guess the individual larvae that manages to get to a suitable surface, it would be, it's probably the same. There's no there's no advantage of captive larvae. But when you capture or when you consolidate the eggs and you have 3000, you know, we deployed three million larvae last week. When you have that much larvae consolidated onto one area, you just got a much higher chance of survival. When coral spawns, that spawn sits as a slick on the top. And if it escapes the mouth of a little damselfish or a little herring or something that's whizzing around trying to eat everything or doesn't get washed out to sea where there's no suitable site, the chance of it settling is about one in a million. Through the larval reseeding project, it's about one in 10000. It reduces the odds or increases the odds of survival and reduces the odds of getting eaten by someone else.

Absolutely. Thank you, Jonny. And Mel, I'm going to come to you now. We've received some really great questions about the economy around the reef, one that we've received during registration. How does, you mentioned about the value in that staggering figure of fifty six billion dollars of our reef systems and value? So have you got an idea or can you give the audience indication how the destruction of the coral reef is affecting Australia's economy? Well, that's a really great question. And you know, obviously we haven't got that modelling at hand, especially in recent times, given the pandemic effects that have happened to the sort of the tourism activity. But certainly, the mitigation tells us that there is a need for some financial instruments to be set up to insure against the damage to the risk to the reef. And that's kind of been the main way that that has been valued in financial terms. Yeah, great. And Dave, coming to you now. So with ocean warming happening and a number of these other stresses facing coral reefs, is ocean warming the greatest threat at the moment, would you say? And what is the current status of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef?

Well, obviously climate change is an incredibly hot topic at the moment with COP26, and I think this has really helped highlight the messaging that unless we limit warming not just to under 1.5 degrees, but really limiting it as much as possible, it really is going to be catastrophic for reefs. They've already changed well beyond recognition from, say, 30 years ago through repeat heatwave events, and those heatwave events are driven by ocean warming. So in other words, we have these increasingly frequent but more intense thermal events during summer, which is already at the upper limits for many of our corals to grow and grow well. And that's obviously pushing these mass bleaching events and in turn, driving to mortality. So when we think about what has bleaching done to the Great Barrier Reef are really again, very timely question. A paper was released just yesterday that demonstrated only two percent of all corals on the Great Barrier Reef have escaped bleaching in the last 30 years. So it really paints the picture now that that all corals on the Great Barrier Reef at some point have been touched by climate change. And just how severe it can be. Now, importantly, corals can recover from bleaching if given a chance if it's not severe enough in terms of intensity or duration, corals can recover, but of course, these climate events are making those events just so intense. So to come back to the question, yes, solving heating is our biggest challenge. We have to solve that if we're going to have reefs in the future. But really, the point we're trying to make with restoration is that any activity to help rebuild biomass and rebuild it quickly beyond natural recovery gives us that extra time to be able to solve climate change because clearly it's in the hands of the policymakers at the moment, which makes it very uncertain.

Absolutely. A wonderful question that I wanted to ask too, and is coming through is how can people get involved in these fantastic programs? Johnny, you mentioned about the tourism, the tourists in the Whitsundays, but all of our speakers have spoken about the incredibly diverse teams that contribute to these efforts. Is there a way for volunteers or visitors or students to participate or contribute to the work that you're doing?

Yeah, luckily, that that certainly is, I guess, from a community point of view, going out with a high standard tourism operator. There's a lot of those that are involved in coral restoration throughout the whole of the Great Barrier Reef, but even locally in the Whitsundays, you have a lot of these operators that are involved, you know, they have it on their website and you can see how you can be involved. As far as students can be involved, some of the operators are looking for students to come on board and be part of it. I know for the larval reseeding project, we're looking at taking a few students out on in a couple of weeks, the trip out to down the mother ship. So there's definitely opportunity there, but you know, the best way to find out is to come to the reef. Go out with an operator. Have a look. Talk to people in different regions because it's different everywhere, and you can normally get your answer on site.

Fantastic, Johnny, thank you, so I guess the best place to be to go for our audience would be to your website for the program and maybe submit an inquiry there.

Yeah, if anyone had any questions, that's really ideal.

So wonderful. Emma, Dave, was there anything that you wanted to add to give for potential university students and how they might get involved in studying or participating in this type of research?

I wasn't sure whether where I would jump in first, but now that I've unmuted, I'll jump in very quickly and just say that, you know, a lot of our research within future reefs for example, we still really focus on the core biology of corals, and that's critical because we need to more, you know, more than ever, we need to understand how they grow, how the environment shapes that and how we can therefore propagate coral. So a lot of our research actually has moved from that sort of core understanding to its applied understanding. And so many of our students that join the program undertake fundamental science, but it's embedded within the actual industry activity. So that's a great way in which many students coming into the system can get involved and actually make a difference through the research on the front line, which is really important not just for them but for us.

Fantastic. Thank you. Mel, another question for you and a common one that we've received both in registration and live today is how can we make a difference as consumers? How can individuals either invest in sustainable finance or make consumer choices that would help support some of the initiatives that you were talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's such a great question, and there are so many different ways that I could answer this, especially when we've just talked about the complexity, right, and the interdependency between these ecosystems. So there's kind of like really direct ways. And then there's sort of indirect ways of doing that, but certainly the most direct way that most people can do if you've got superannuation, then you have the ability to be able to decide where your superannuation funds go. Then you certainly choose a sustainable portfolio or ask your, you know, ask the person managing your superannuation if they can help you with this decision. So it can be a complex decision, but that's what those services are there for. And, you know, in terms of the broader question as well that you asked about students getting involved, I would say if anyone is here from the business student community, it's really important to understand and understand the science, speak to scientists. I mean, you know, this isn't the beginning of a collaboration that we've been working on with C-3, and I've learnt so much as a business academic being involved in this. But even in the business school, it's understanding sustainable finance and what it is putting your bright minds towards, you know, the type of modelling that's required to answer the question that you asked me up-front, about how can we understand climate effects on the damages to these ecosystems and particularly in the context of a post-pandemic world? These are questions, and we want all the smart minds we can possibly get working on them. Absolutely. And that's something I've certainly taken away from today that it would require such a diversity of thought and perspective and experience that if we're going to solve these big problems and create innovations and solutions, we need to have everyone involved in this. So that leaves an open question to everyone, really, which is this really delicate balance when we're talking about these very complex ecosystems, the help versus harm question. When do you know when it's the right time to intervene? No one wants to take this? Dave.

I'll jump in just to initiate some response because it is a huge topic. I think it's multilayered as well in terms of the answers and so on. I can touch on some and no doubt everyone else will have additional thoughts. But you know, when do we do more harm? Well, at this stage, I think most people, whether it's scientists or stakeholders, are of the mindset that it's better to do something for nothing. You know, our only options, you know, to some extent at the moment are lobbying to reduce climate emissions. So to many as well, that's very unsatisfying in the sense that we need also some immediate alternative actions to make a difference. However, restorations are really, really young fields, not just for reefs, but for forests or for mangroves or for seagrass. So we still don't actually know the answers as to how well our activities are ultimately making a difference to the ecology and to society. Now, having said that, a lot of our really early efforts already showed that we are improving coral biomass. We're improving diversity, but we're only able to achieve that through a really scientifically rigorous process. So again, some of that scientific rigorous process is identifying actually, there are points where we don't want to restore reefs, and Emma really made some great points about that and understanding the local ecologies and the and the local use of the reef. And ultimately, we shouldn't be looking at restoring every single reef. So it's making targeted decisions. So in terms of harm versus help, at this point in time, we certainly are helping. But the question is to what extent.

And I imagine, as you said, it takes all lots of different changes, lots of different factors, lots of different levers to be pulled in order to tackle such a complex question.

Absolutely.

Emma, did you want to jump in as well? Yeah. Just to add to that, I think some of the innovative techniques I touched on, a lot of those are in an, you know, an R&D stage at the moment. And that's because we ultimately need to start to test them to be able to get to that answer. Is it going to work? Is it going to do more harm than good? Because it's like a portfolio. It's like a toolbox of approaches and not one of them is going to be the solution to everything. But again, as Dave pointed out, to addressing climate change and lobbying is kind of the biggest tool that we have, but we know that that's not enough at the moment. So again, by exploring this portfolio, we can say, OK, these ones work, these ones don't. This is how we can improve them. But the bottom line is that we need that information and that science, so that if we get to a point where the only option is to throw everything at it, we have this information in this scientific backing to say, OK, actually, this is the best way that we can implement that and that will help reduce the risk. And you know, for context, when we do these activities, there's a rigorous process. There's permitting, there are discussions, there is a risk mindset that's put into place when we go into this. So again, an example would be if we're going to move corals between locations and we are allowed to do that. You think about things about when is when are they reproductively active and should we move them back before they are spawning? So all of these things are being considered so that we kind of iteratively minimize the risk to maximize a positive outcome from our activities.

Awesome. Thank you, Emma, and I'm just going to stay with you and then anyone else who wants to jump in on this as well? Just getting into the nitty gritty, then when you're doing this work, we've received a great question online, which is when a coral is bleached, I think this is speaking to your choice of where to go and the intervention or choosing. The question is when a coral is bleached, is the coral left on the reef or is it removed to make space for new corals? So I think they've kind of touched in this area, but the really important thing is just because the corals bleach doesn't necessarily mean that it's died at that point in time. So if the stress isn't prolonged, then the coral may recover. So just because it's bleached, we definitely wouldn't remove it or anything. At that point in time, we would hope that it may naturally recover. Now, if it doesn't, then it obviously still produces that 3D structure that forms the reef. And so we would try to naturally use that substrate for the different techniques we've discussed. Now in some cases, that may mean that there actually isn't the best substrate available for restoration, and there could be then discussion to have as to whether or not that needs to be manipulated. But at the moment, rather than actually removing that or changing that, we just changed the type of technique we would implement. So, for example, using a star that would go over that to produce a more favorable environment for the space. So the key is that structure it leaves is still kind of important for new coral to potentially recruit onto. Fantastic. Look we, we're really short of time now and I'm sorry, I have received so many fantastic questions and we haven't been able to get them all through today. But I would like to thank you all the panelists today for such an exciting talk and a really wonderful opportunity to learn more about the incredible impact that your work and your collaboration is having to protect these incredible ecosystems. So lastly, for our audience, if you would like to learn more, we are going to, sorry, let me just bring up this last slide so you can see this information. Here we go. We'll be sending a copy of today's talk as long as well as the Q&A session to everyone who registered, and it will also be on our website very soon. So if you've got any other questions been spoken about today, you can get them through the participant's websites and we wish you a very happy World Science Day and thank you for joining us.