Description du sujet de thèse

The overall objective is to study the mechanisms of stress resistance and longevity in corals, and to apply this knowledge to the development of effective methods for monitoring coral reef health. Coral reefs are rapidly degrading, and the development of rapid and effective monitoring systems to assess their health is essential. Better understanding coral stress resistance and longevity, as well as predicting coral mortality, is a major objective to effectively understand the impact of climate change and anthropogenic pressure on coral reefs. We previously published that long-lived corals possess telomeres, an essential pathway to ensure their longevity and maintain their somatic cells, which are less sensitive to temperature variations than short-lived corals. We now aim to deepen our understanding, through large-scale studies in the wild, of the links between telomeres, the environment, and coral health. To this end, we defined a combination of visual attributes related to the health of a coral colony, which can be easily extracted from colony photographs and compared to molecular and environmental data. The PhD program is divided into three tasks: 1) Modeling the relationships between the health-related visual attributes of a given reef coral colony and the age, transcriptomic, telomeric, metabarcoding (symbiont composition) and coral morphology data generated for that same colony. These data will be analyzed using biostatistical and artificial intelligence (AI) tools from a dataset of 1,000 colonies sampled in the Pacific during the Tara-Pacific expedition. 2) Modeling the environmental determinants of health-related attributes in contrasting sites in Moorea (French Polynesia) and Indonesia (Papua, Raja Ampat and Bali). These data will be analyzed using biostatistical and AI tools from a dataset of 5,000 colonies sampled at the study sites over the past two years. 3) Design of AI machines capable of automatically recognizing health-related attributes and predicting the health of the coral reef studied. This approach can serve as a model for coral health studies and "One-Health" approaches.

Contexte de travail

The recruted person will be co-directed by Pr Eric GILSON and Dr Eric ROTTINGER

Contraintes et risques

-None

Informations complémentaires

None