After a four year hiatus due to COVID -19 (Kiritimati was close to international travel for 3.3yrs) we finally made it back! We did a short non-research trip in June of 2023 to meet with our collaborators on island and to take stock of the our equipment stored on island. We were also excited to set up our brand new dive compressor on that trip. We set it up at the Ministry of Fisheries and are excited to support their reef monitoring and develop that relationship further.
In September, a team of four went to Kiritimati for our first science expedition since COVID (16th science overall)! Kristina Tietjen led the trip and was joined by Daisy Buzzoni and Dominica Harrison who are both PhD candidates in the lab. They were also joined by Emie Woodburn as a dive technician. This trip was largely focused on getting the big picture of what had changed over the past four years. To do this we sampled our tagged adult coral colonies (and tagged new ones), collected photos for community composition, and photographed the reef for 3D models. We saw very noticeable signs of overall reef recovery which was very exciting. It may be bittersweet though because while we were there Kiritimati was well into 7+ degree heating weeks (DHW) due to the newest El Niño. The team did not see any bleaching occurring yet but some of the Merulinidae family were starting to pale in color. Fingers crossed that the El Niño is short lived and that all the recovery that we saw is not lost. We are now working hard to process the samples from this expedition and hope to be able to share soon the results from it! Particularly how much the reef had recovered! Contact Julia (baum 'at' uvic.ca) or Kristina (kiritimatiprojectmanager 'at' gmail.com) for more information. For more information about our lab head over to our lab website: juliakbaum.org Follow us on Twitter: @baumlab and @tietjenk or check out #kiritimati2023 |