Marine Gouezo

Biography

Originally from a fishing town in the south of France, Marine spent most of her education and early career as a coral reef ecologist overseas. Marine gained valuable experience working for the NGO ReefDoctor in Madagascar, for the Palau International Coral Reef Center, in Palau (Micronesia), for 6 years, during which she completed her PhD as an offshore student, and now is a postdoctoral researcher in Australia. Through these years of experience, Marine spent a significant amount of time at sea and 1000's of hours underwater collecting data on coral reefs.

Research

Marine’s research interests lie primarily in coral reef recovery along environmental gradients, whether recovery occurs naturally or is kickstarted by restoration actions. Her overarching research goal is to pinpoint what slows down the recovery of reefs, which often differs from reef to reef, to offer context-specific management options to fix it. 

Marine investigates the influence of reefs’ environments and their biophysical attributes on ecological processes occurring during recovery. These processes include larval dispersal, coral recruitment, coral growth and coral community reassembly. Currently, through her postdoctoral researcher role, part of the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program of the Great Barrier Reef (https://gbrrestoration.org/program/moving-corals/), Marine's research specifically focuses on two of these key ecological processes that occur at an 'invisible' scale to the human naked eye: coral larval supply and recruitment. Marine uses this unique research opportunity to study how coral larvae are transported and dispersed by currents and how these patterns relates to successful recruitment, to better understand the ecological footprint of coral larval restoration actions.

Marine's research is multidisciplinary and has allowed her to collaborate with oceanographers, modellers, and computer programmers. Marine works closely with oceanographers and modellers from CSIRO to fine tune larval dispersal models to better capture the complexity of local currents dynamics around coral reefs. Additionally, thanks to her extensive coral reef monitoring experience, Marine is developing new methods to monitor coral recruitment in situ on natural substrata and to fast-track the processing of high resolution imagery.

As a coral reef ecologist, Marine strives to explore the unknown of coral reef ecology to better understand how these complex ecosystems work, so they can be restored before it is too late.