We are really pleased to welcome Luís to the lab - not only as our lab manager but also research technician. We look forward to working with him, both in Portugal and in the field, and hope he is ready to help keep the lab running smoothly…

A new paper led by Vivi is out in Limnology and Oceanography. We showed that local surface complexity affects availability of light across reef surfaces using in situ light measurements taken across our long term monitoring sites in Australia.

Read the full paper here: https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lno.70493

The team had a fantastic time at ICRS 2026. They spent time hearing, and sharing, exciting research updates and catching up with old faces and new.

A busy time of year, and another PhD has been successfully completed and defended - well done Vicki! Wishing you all the best for the next steps in your journey.

Congratulations Cher! After years of hard work, Cher finally celebrated her graduation and is already working hard on her post-doc at Lancaster Uni. Well done Cher, the lab will miss you but really excited to see where your career will take you.

The team have been busy! We have another recently published paper to share. We have been using benthic metabolic chambers to quantify rugosity–productivity relationships across shallow reef plots in Australia and Hawaiʻi. Our findings show that habitat complexity is a strong predictor of energy fluxes in a variable reef environment, and reefs with complex habitat structure fix more net organic carbon.

Follow here to learn more:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03093-3

We are very excited to share another recently published paper with you, The findings of which can improve the way we interpret patterns of biodiversity change across different systems.

Follow here to learn more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.70353

Sofia, our project manager, is leaving us to move onto a new challenge. We will miss her hugely, and would like to thank her for all of her hard work keeping us in line over the last few years.

We are very excited to share Emily’s recently published paper with you, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0347307

In this work we show how measuring coral restoration progress can be supported with bioacoustic analysis to reveal unique soundscapes and communities!

Do you have a BSc in a scientific field? Experience managing projects? Enjoy being on the water / carrying out marine fieldwork? Speak Portuguese and English? We are currently recruiting for a Research Technician, and you may be perfect! More information is linked below, but be quick! The deadline is June 29th.

https://www.euraxess.pt/jobs/440210

Maria delivers a keynote talk and a panel on science and policy at the Species on the Move conference (SOTM), in Taiwan

Dani joins the lab as an MSCA researcher. He will focus on exploring the impacts of global change on marine biodiversity, with an emphasis on coral ecosystems.

Maria visits Charles University in Prague to deliver an invited seminar on “Biodiversity change in the recent past”.

Using colony-level photogrammetry, this study tracked morphological development in corals over four years. Read more here.

Maria attends the second author meeting for the IPBES assessment on biodiversity monitoring at the European Space Agency, Frascati, Italy.

Emily received a BES Training Grant to join the “Computer Vision Methods for Ecology” course in Washington, DC.

The new study Random encounter modelling as a viable method to estimate absolute abundance of reef fish explores a robust method for estimating reef fish abundance. Learn more here.

Garrett and Maria celebrate a well-deserved milestone together at the University of St Andrews graduation ceremony.

New paper out in Springer Nature: coral settler presence probability increases along a range of coral-built structural complexity.