2nd Year PGR Talks - Natural History Museum, London, UK; School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol; 4D-Reef, a MSCA Innovative Training Network (https://www.4d-reef.eu/)

Studying massive coral growth from X-ray microCT outputs allied to Artificial Intelligence: challenges, perspectives and future applications 

keletons of massive (i.e., boulder-like) coral colonies provide an invaluable record of coral reef health. A colony's growth record consists of annual band couplets of high- and low-density that can be analysed using X-ray microCT. This technology enables the reconstruction of a high-resolution 3D model of the entire colony and the measurement of growth features across the coral skeleton. Fluctuations in growth rates and skeleton extension, for example, can indicate responses to changes in sea surface temperature, turbidity, terrigenous input, stress as well as interactions with coral endobionts. In my talk, I will present some of the work my colleagues and I have been doing to automate the identification of skeletal density boundaries in coral skeletons of massive Porites species using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Then, I will illustrate some of the metrics that can be extracted from each individual colony both in 2D and 3D and how AI can help upscale the throughput of information, thus helping us move from the 'single-coral’ scale to address reef-wide scientific questions, for example, by better constraining carbonate reef budgets. Finally, I will close my session with some future applications of this technology and the challenges moving forward.