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. Over the years, Marine has spent extensive time at sea and logged thousands of underwater hours collecting coral reef data.

Marine's work contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals

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 relate to successful recruitment, to better understand the ecological footprint of coral larval restoration actions.

Marine’s multidisciplinary research involves close collaboration with CSIRO oceanographers and modellers to refine larval dispersal models around coral reefs. Drawing on her extensive field experience, she’s also developing innovative methods to monitor coral recruitment on natural substrates and streamline high-resolution image analysis.

As a coral reef ecologist, Marine seeks to uncover the complexities of reef ecosystems to support their restoration before it's too late.