Recorded April 29, 2022
Speaker: Dr. Daniel Holstein
Abstract: In many fragmented coastal marine populations like coral reefs, persistence is driven by the dispersal or retention of larvae in coastal or ocean currents. Understanding the connectivity of habitat patches through larval migrations - or potentially by disease - is critical to anticipating the effects of global change on these metapopulations. However, larvae and disease propagules are often difficult or impossible to track in the field. My laboratory employs coupled biophysical models to understand how metapopulations are connected by larval migration or by the transport of disease. Using these models we can identify reefs critical for network persistence, design restoration strategies, and potentially mitigate the increasing risk of emergent diseases.
Bio: Dan Holstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University. He received his PhD in 2013 from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. He then postdoc’d at the University of the Virgin Islands, and was a McCurdy Visiting Scholar at Duke University’s Marine Laboratory. Dan is a coral reef ecologist, a biophysical and ecological modeler, and a technical diver, who also loves to doodle and build sand castles when he can.
