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Study siteThe study was carried out in post-agriculture forests at different growth stages near the forest reserve of Yoko (N00°17′; E25°18′; mean elevation 435 m a.s.l.), situated between 29 and 39 km south east of Kisangani, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We set up 15 (40 × 40 m) plots, set out in triplicate along five successional stages (15 plots): agriculture and 5, 12, 20, 60 years old secondary forest (respectively, 5 yrs, 12 yrs, 20 yrs, 60 yrs). Additionally, soils were also characterized in three agricultural plots (Ag). We interviewed owners, farmers, and local experts to determine the time-since-disturbance of all plots. Tree height measurements were recorded at the plot level for 20% of individuals of each diameter class. The climax vegetation in the region is classified as semi-deciduous tropical. Climate falls within the Af-type following the Köppen-Geiger classification33. Annual rainfall ranges from 1418 to 1915 mm with mean monthly temperatures varying from 23.7 to 26.2 °C. Throughout the year, the region is marked by a long and a short rainy season interrupted by two small dry seasons December–January and June–August. Soils in the region are highly weathered Oxisols, being poor in nutrients, with low pH and dominated by sandy texture.Sampling and sample analysisThroughfall and bulk precipitation was collected weekly using polyethylene (PE) funnels supported by a wooden pole of 1.5 m height to which a PE tube was attached and draining into 5 L PE container. A nylon mesh was placed in the neck of the funnel to avoid contamination by large particles. The container was buried in the soil and covered by leaves to avoid the growth of algae and to keep the samples cool. We installed eight throughfall collectors in each plot as two rows of four collectors, with approximately 8 m distance between all collectors. On every sampling occasion, the water volume in each collector was measured in the field, and recipients, funnels and mesh were replaced, rinsed with distilled water. A volume-weighted composite sample of the devices per plot was made. All samples were stored in a freezer immediately and sent in batch to Belgium for chemical analysis. The volume-weighted composite samples were first filtered using a nylon membrane filter of 0.45 µm before freezing. Total phosphorus was measured by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP AES, IRIS interpid II XSP, Thermo Scientific, USA). Although we acknowledge the potential for microbial activity in the collectors during a 1-week, dark, in situ storage of the samples, the use of total phosphorus concentration and lack of algal growth allow for complete phosphorus recovery.Following analysis, the samples from the replicate field sites per forest stage were pooled into ‘weekly’ forest-type samples, and these were subsequently analyzed for dissolved black carbon (DBC). In short, the pooled water samples were acidified to pH 2 and analyzed for dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration via high-temperature catalytic oxidation on Shimadzu TOC-L total organic carbon analyzer following established methodology34. DOC was isolated from the water samples by solid phase extraction (SPE) following Dittmar et al.35. Briefly, SPE cartridges (Varian Bond Elut PPL, 1 g, 6 mL) were conditioned sequentially with methanol, ultrapure water, and ultrapure water acidified to pH 2 using concentrated HCl, then passed through the SPE cartridges by gravity. SPE cartridges were dried under a stream of high-purity N2 gas. DOC was eluted from the SPE cartridge with methanol (SPE-DOC) and stored at −20 °C until further analysis. DBC was quantified using the benzenepolycarboxylic acid (BPCA) method as detailed in Wagner et al.20. The BPCA approach to quantifying DBC involves chemothermal oxidation of condensed aromatic DOC compounds to benzenehexacarboxylic acid (B6CA) and benzenepentacarboxylic acid (B5CA) products. The B6CA and B5CA oxidation products are robustly measured and derive exclusively from pyrogenic sources36. Condensed aromatic DBC, as measured using the BPCA method, is ubiquitous in aquatic environments globally21,37,38,39. DBC has also been quantified in throughfall and stemflow in longleaf pine forests that undergo regular prescribed burning40. Therefore, we use the BPCA method as a proxy for carbon inputs from biomass burning in the current study. To analyze our samples for BPCAs, aliquots of SPE-DOC (~0.5 mg C equivalents) were combined with concentrated HNO3 in flame-sealed glass ampoules and heated to 160 °C for 6 h. The resultant BPCA-containing residue was dried and re-dissolved in mobile phase for subsequent analysis. Individual BPCAs were separated and quantified using an HPLC system (UltiMate 3000, Thermo Fisher, Germany) (CV  More

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A diverse and active DNA virosphereWe first leveraged two existing metagenomes that were constructed from the Konza native prairie soil14,15 to screen for viral sequences at the site. Each of the metagenomes was obtained from a composite of all the replicate soils collected at ambient field moisture conditions. One of the metagenomes was de novo assembled from deep sequence data (1.1 Tb)14 and the second was a hybrid assembly of short and long reads (267.0 Gb)16. The combination of the two metagenomes was used to maximize the coverage of viral sequences from the Konza prairie site. To balance between the detection limits of the viral detection tools and the wide range of viral genome size, the viral contigs > 2.5 kb in length were combined with those obtained from screening of the two largest public viral databases (i.e., IMG/VR17 and NCBI Virus16) to further increase the coverage of DNA viral sequences. We acknowledge that the length cutoff of 2.5 kb would preclude detection of some ssDNA viruses with small segmented genome sizes (e.g., Nanoviridae18). As a result, a DNA viral database for the site was curated that included 726,108 de-replicated viral contigs. The DNA viral database then served as a scaffold for mapping of metatranscriptome and metaproteome datasets to determine the activities of soil DNA viruses and their responses to differences in soil moisture. This approach was also recently applied to detect the transcriptional activity of marine prokaryotic and eukaryotic viruses19,20,21,22 and giant viruses in soil5.The metatranscriptome reads from both wet and dry treatments were mapped to a total of 416 unique DNA viral contigs using stringent criteria (% sequence identity > 95% and % sequence coverage > 80%). The 416 DNA viral contigs with an average sequence length of 19 kb were highly diverse and grouped into 139 clusters, with 111 of the clusters being singletons (Supplementary Data 1).We aimed to assign putative host taxa to the viral clusters by combining several approaches: CRISPR spacer matching, and screening for host and viral sequence similarities to respective databases (details in ‘Methods’). As a result, we assigned putative viral host taxa to 160 out of the 416 transcribed DNA viral contigs. Some of these were assigned to more than one host (Supplementary Data 1), resulting in a total of 181 virus–host pairings (Fig. 1a). Of these, 79 host–virus pairs were detected only in the dry soil treatment, 51 were only in the wet soil treatment, and an additional 51 were found in both dry and wet treatments (Fig. 1a). Consistent with previous reports4, the majority of the transcribed DNA viral contigs were annotated as bacteriophage sequences. Different sets of transcribed DNA viral contigs were unique to wet or dry soils and assigned to specific hosts at the phylum level, whereas others were shared (Fig. 1a). However, the dominant soil taxa, i.e., Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria that were previously identified by 16S rRNA gene sequencing in this soil environment, were predicted as hosts under both wet and dry conditions (Supplementary Fig. 1a). Eukaryotic DNA viruses, such as Bracovirus and Ichnovirus belonging to a family of insect viruses within the Polydnaviridae family, were also transcribed in the soils (Fig. 1a and Supplementary Data 1). Most of these insect viruses were only detected in dry soil conditions. These differences in virus–host pairings suggest that some of the respective hosts were impacted differently by the dry and wet incubation conditions.Fig. 1: Transcribed DNA viral communities and their responses to wet and dry soil conditions.a An alluvium plot that illustrates pairings of the transcribed DNA viral contigs to putative host phyla. The transcribed DNA viral community was comprised of viral contigs from the curated DNA viral databases that were mapped by quality-filtered metatranscriptomic reads. The alluvia are colored by host taxa (first x axis of each sub-panel) assigned to respective transcribed DNA viral contigs (second x axis of each sub-panel). b A Venn diagram showing the number of unique transcribed DNA viral contigs detected in both wet and dry soils and ones exclusively detected in one of the soils. c Number of unique DNA viral contigs detected. A t-Test shows significantly more DNA contigs were transcribed in dry soil (p = 0.044). d Number of transcripts that mapped to the DNA viral contigs. For panels (c) and (d), the two independent field sites of Konza Experimental Field Station are indicated as site A (circles) and site C (triangles), with the wet soil in blue and dry soil in red.Full size imageThere were 21 DNA viral contigs that were assigned to hosts across multiple bacterial phyla suggesting the presence of viral generalists1,23 (Supplementary Data 1). We recognize that host assignment based on CRISPR spacer matching, however, is limited to detection of recent or historical virus–host interactions that were captured at the time of sampling24. As bioinformatics assignment of virus–host linkages only suggests possible pairings based on sequence features, there are also chances of introducing false positives. However, we applied the most stringent criteria possible to provide confident host assignments.Increased activity of a subset of DNA viruses in wet soilSoil moisture has a strong influence on the community structures of transcribed DNA viruses. The majority of the transcriptionally active DNA viral contigs were unique to wet or dry conditions, with only 111 viral contigs (~ 26.7%) detected in both wet and dry soils, suggesting that the different soil moisture conditions may shape the activity of the DNA viral community differently (Fig. 1b). Interestingly, although a significantly higher number of transcribed DNA viral contigs were detected in dry soils (Fig. 1b, c), the levels of transcriptional activity were significantly higher (based on the normalized abundance of RNA reads that mapped to the viral contigs) for DNA viruses in wet soils irrespective of sampling site location (Fig. 1d). DNA viral contigs with mapped transcripts could represent either prophages that are passively replicated along with their host genomes, or (lytic) viruses that are actively regulating early/middle/late expression of viral gene clusters25. In soil, a lysogenic lifestyle is considered to be an adaptive strategy for viruses to cope with long periods of low host activity26,27. Therefore, the 1.5-fold increase in the number of transcribed DNA viral contigs representing transcriptionally active DNA viruses, but with lower levels of overall transcription, in dry soil suggests that the increase was due to a higher prevalence of lysogeny in dry conditions. This hypothesis is strengthened by our finding of a 20-fold increase in transcripts for lysogenic markers (i.e., integrase and excisionase) in one of our replicates (A-2) in dry compared to wet conditions (Supplementary Data 2). High number of lysogenic phages were also previously reported in dry Antarctic soils using a cultivation-independent induction assay28. By contrast, under wet soil conditions we found a 2-fold increase in transcription of fewer viral contigs representing a subset of DNA viruses, suggesting that those viruses were more transcriptionally active in response to higher soil moisture. In addition, there was a higher correlation between prokaryotic abundances, as estimated by 16S rRNA gene sequencing, with DNA viral transcript counts in wet soils (R2 = 0.593, Supplementary Fig. 1d) in comparison to dry soils (R2 = 0.069, Supplementary Fig. 1d), supporting this hypothesis.We then identified which soil DNA viruses were most transcriptionally active and how they responded to the differences in soil moisture. As the majority of the transcribed DNA viral contigs (97%) were environmental viruses with unclassified taxonomy assignment, we were not able to calculate the taxonomic abundance of each and instead compared the differential abundances of the transcribed viral contigs. There were four DNA viral contigs with significantly different levels of transcription under wet and dry conditions (VC_1, VC_19, VC_282, VC_412; Fig. 2a). Contigs VC_1 and VC_19 correspond to unclassified viral contigs deposited in IMG/VR (identifiers of ‘REF:2547132004_2547132004’ and ‘3300010038_Ga0126315_10000854’) that were previously detected in metagenomes from the Rifle site29 and from serpentine soil in the UC McLaughlin Reserve30, respectively. Contigs VC_282 and VC_412 were extracted from our Kansas metagenomes. Contigs VC_1 and VC_19 had significantly higher levels of transcriptional activity in wet soils compared to dry soils (p  More

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NEWS AND VIEWS
25 August 2021

African tropical montane forests store more carbon than was thought

The inaccessibility of African montane forests has hindered efforts to quantify the carbon stored by these ecosystems. A remarkable survey fills this knowledge gap, and highlights the need to preserve such forests.

Nicolas Barbier

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Nicolas Barbier

Nicolas Barbier is at AMAP, Université de Montpellier, IRD, CNRS, INRAE, CIRAD, Montpellier 34980, France.

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In a paper in Nature, Cuni-Sanchez et al.1 report the assembly of a large database of tree inventories for 226 mature montane-forest plots in 12 African countries. The authors analyse the data to determine the amount of aboveground biomass and carbon stored in these highly diverse and threatened ecosystems. Their results suggest that African montane forests store more carbon than was previously thought, and the findings should help to guide efforts to conserve these ecosystems.Cuni-Sanchez and colleagues measured trunk diameters and heights of the trees in plots, and identified the botanical species to deduce wood density — an approach that constitutes the gold standard for estimating the biomass, and thus the amount of carbon, contained per unit of forest area. This method involves the use of general statistical equations for describing tree form, called allometric models, and considers only the aboveground parts of trees. It therefore disregards several other pools of carbon, notably in the roots and soil. The overall approach might seem crude, but recognizing and measuring the many hundreds of tree species found on steep, cloud-shrouded slopes (Fig. 1), let alone the underground carbon, without visiting the sites, will long remain difficult, even with the best drones and satellite systems.

Figure 1 | Montane forest in Boginda, Ethiopia. Cuni-Sanchez et al.1 use data from a survey of montane tropical forests in Africa to quantify the amount of carbon stored above ground in these ecosystems.Credit: Bruno D’Amicis/Nature Picture Library

Anyone who has conducted field inventories in tropical mountains knows that measuring and identifying 72,336 trees, often just a few steps away from the void, is an amazing feat. For comparison, a previously reported study2 based its estimates of the carbon stored in montane African forests on as few as seven plots. The study also brings together contributions from numerous researchers and institutions, including many in Africa, to greatly increase the size of the data set, which is also a remarkable achievement. Even so, the total area of forest studied is less than 150 hectares, whereas African montane forest covers about 100,000 times that area, inevitably raising questions about how representative the inventory is.Statisticians might raise their eyebrows at the sampling design. As is usually the case in meta-analyses, the data set was neither homogeneous (for example, there is a roughly tenfold variation in the plot sizes), nor were the sites selected at random. However, the authors did their best to rule out possible biases induced by sampling artefacts.
Read the paper: High aboveground carbon stock of African tropical montane forests
Cuni-Sanchez et al. chose not to discuss one tricky aspect of surveys of this sort (extensively discussed elsewhere2): how should the land area of a steep slope be measured? The authors followed standard practice, which is to measure the extent of forest plots and of land-cover types in reference to horizontal, planimetric areas (that is, the areas that would be represented on a 2D map, as if seen from the air). This tends to overestimate aboveground carbon because the sloped surface area is greater than that of the planimetric area — which means that the tree density of the planimetric area is higher than it is on the slope. By contrast, the use of planimetric areas underestimates total montane-forest area (by about 40%; see ref. 2). These two biases should roughly cancel each other out when estimating carbon stocks, or changes to stocks, for a region or country. But care should be taken not to combine data acquired using planimetric and non-planimetric areas in future meta-analyses, because the resulting estimates could end up well off the mark.One might expect that trees in mature African montane forests would be, on average, shorter — and therefore store less carbon — than their lowland counterparts, because of their lower environmental temperatures and shallow soils, frequent landslides and strong winds. However, this is not what Cuni-Sanchez et al. report. Instead, they find that average aboveground carbon stocks are not significantly different from those of mature lowland forests. This contrasts with the situation in the neotropics and southeast Asia, where montane forests store, on average, less carbon than do lowland forests.However, the new results fit with the 2016 discovery that the tallest African trees (81.5 metres) grow on Mount Kilimanjaro3, the highest mountain in Africa. African forests, in general, tend to contain fewer but larger-statured tree stands than does, for example, Amazonia4. The current study confirms that this peculiarity applies even at high altitudes.The authors investigate several possible drivers for the variations in biomass observed at different sites in their study, including topography, climate, landslide hazard, and even the presence of elephants or certain conifers (Podocarpaceae), but were unable to identify any clear pattern. Many environmental, historical and biological effects probably interact, with each of these effects varying greatly in ways that are poorly captured by available data sets. These effects must therefore be disentangled before a predictive model of African montane carbon distribution can be developed.
Tropical carbon sinks are saturating at different times on different continents
Nevertheless, Cuni-Sanchez and colleagues’ study underlines a crucial message: African montane forests are immensely valuable, and not only because they host the source of the River Nile, mountain gorillas and ecosystems such as mysterious lichen-covered forests. They also store vast amounts of carbon, and thereby have a key role in tackling climate change. Of course, this immense intrinsic value does not preclude intense human exploitation of these ecosystems, which can lead to rapid degradation and deforestation. For instance, on the basis of satellite monitoring, Cuni-Sanchez and colleagues report that Mozambique lost nearly one-third of its montane forests between 2000 and 2018.There is, however, the faint hope that putting a financial value on carbon, and the establishment of economic incentives to avoid deforestation in tropical countries, might help to check the flood of damage5. The aim is to reward African countries — for which montane forest sometimes constitutes the last remaining forests — for their conservation endeavours, and for renouncing efforts to access the timber and ore in these ecosystems, even when such resources are otherwise desperately lacking. By gathering the best-available data to provide precise, country-level estimates of average aboveground carbon content in African montane forests, Cuni-Sanchez and colleagues’ study will add weight to such efforts — not least because the new estimates are, on average, two-thirds higher than the values reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change6.The next step should be to extend measurements in these forests, particularly by continuing to support national forest-inventory efforts. These inventories target all vegetation types, rather than just the most intact forests, and all carbon pools, using standardized protocols and systematic sampling methods. Remote sensors, both in the sky and in space, should also be used to fully map the detailed spatial variation of forest diversity, structure and dynamics. But there is no excuse for delaying policymaking — we already know enough to justify immediate decisive action to preserve yet another of Earth’s threatened treasures.

Nature 596, 488-490 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02266-3

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In place of its normal load of cars and vans, the repurposed ferry boat sported a mobile science laboratory and a large fan on its deck as it left Townsville, Australia, in March. Researchers dropped anchor in a coral lagoon some 100 kilometres offshore and then fired up the cone-shaped turbine, which blew a mist of seawater off the back of the boat. What happened next came as a welcome surprise: after briefly drifting along the ocean surface, the plume ascended into the sky.Looking a bit like a jet engine, this mist machine is at the centre of an experiment that, if successful, could help to determine the future of the Great Barrier Reef. Three-hundred and twenty nozzles spewed a cloud of nano-sized droplets engineered to brighten clouds and block sunlight — providing a bit of cooling shade for the coral colonies below. Scientists used sensors aboard the ferry, drones and a second boat to monitor the plume as it migrated skyward.The experiment wasn’t big enough to significantly alter the clouds. But preliminary results from the field tests — which were shared exclusively with Nature — suggest that the technology might perform even better than computer models suggested it would, says Daniel Harrison, an oceanographer and engineer at Southern Cross University in Coffs Harbour, Australia, who is heading up the research. “We are now very confident that we can get the particles up into the clouds,” Harrison says. “But we still need to figure out how the clouds will respond.”Harrison’s project is the world’s first field trial of marine cloud brightening, one of several controversial geoengineering technologies that scientists have studied in the laboratory for decades. The research has been driven by fear that humans might one day be forced to deliberately manipulate the Earth’s climate and weather systems to blunt the most severe impacts of global warming.For many Australians, that day arrived in 2017, when a marine heat wave spurred massive coral bleaching and death across much of the 2,300-kilometre Great Barrier Reef. That crisis hit just a year after another bleaching event along the reef, which supports more than 600 species of coral and an estimated 64,000 jobs in industries such as tourism and fishing. Research suggests that the reef lost more than half of its coral between 1995 and 2017, as a result of warming waters, tropical storms and predatory starfish (A. Dietzel et al. Proc. R. Soc. B. 287, 20201432; 2020).
These corals could survive climate change — and help save the world’s reefs
The project has raised concerns among some scientists abroad, in part because the Australian group has published little about its work. Environmentalists outside Australia objected to the project last year after news of the first trial broke, and there could be similar criticism when details of the 2021 trial emerge.Harrison stresses that the cloud-brightening project is about local adaptation to climate change, not global geoengineering, because its application would be limited in both space and time. It’s also just one part of a larger Aus$300 million (US$220 million) Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP) launched last year by Australia to investigate and develop techniques and technologies to save the country’s reefs. Many of the proposals, from cloud brightening to breeding heat-tolerant corals, would represent unprecedented human interventions in the natural reef system.Ecological modelling suggests that a large-scale intervention involving multiple strategies — including a fleet of mist machines — could prolong the life of the reef while governments work to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions. The goal now is to work out what’s achievable in the real world, says Cedric Robillot, executive director of the RRAP.“You need to consider every angle, from the fundamental science to the very pointy end of engineering, if you want to succeed,” Robillot says. “It’s not enough to just prove you could do it. You need to explain how you would do it.”Into the cloudsHarrison conducted his first field test in March 2020: a three-day proof-of-concept expedition on a small car ferry with four scientists, one representative from a local Indigenous group, and two shipping containers for equipment and sleeping quarters. The team had a minimal Aus$400,000 budget and limited scientific instrumentation to monitor the mist, but it was enough to document that the plume flowing out of their mist machine rode a draught of warm air high into the sky.It was the first time they had witnessed this phenomenon. Their models had suggested that evaporation of the brine droplets would cool the plume, which would then float across the surface of the ocean, only slowly mixing upwards into the low-lying marine clouds. The models also indicated a risk that the tiny droplets might merge and drop out of the air. Instead, brine droplets floated along the surface of the ocean for half a kilometre without coalescing, gradually losing water and weight to evaporation along the way. And then they shot upwards.

A marine heat wave in 2017 caused coral bleaching along much of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.Credit: Juergen Freund/Nature Picture Library

“We didn’t expect that at all,” Harrison says, “but it turned out we were doing this experiment in the middle of a rising air mass.”The scientists feared it was a fluke. Although years of research and development have gone into the nozzles, initially led by a separate American team, this was the first time anybody had ever deployed them in the field with fresh seawater. The team also didn’t know what to expect from clouds and aerosols in that region, because research on the reef has focused almost exclusively on what happens below the water, not the conditions above.For Harrison, the 2020 experiment was more than enough to justify moving forward with another, larger trial in March 2021. But it did raise eyebrows among some scientists and observers abroad, where geoengineering research has met strong opposition and struggled to attract funding.
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Most of the concern has centred on a form of solar geoengineering that involves injecting reflective material into the stratosphere to block sunlight at a global scale. But cloud brightening has also been studied as a potential global intervention, and it has attracted criticism from some environmental groups who argue that it carries inevitable ecological risks and detracts from efforts to limit greenhouse gases.Some scientists, as well as environmental advocates who follow geoengineering research, told Nature that they were surprised to see the experiment move forward without more scrutiny — or without published research to justify such an investment.Critics also worry that Australia is setting the wrong kind of precedent by rebranding a solar-geoengineering experiment that could have regional impacts as a local adaptation project. “One could say that there should have been some level of consultation with the outside world,” says Janos Pasztor, who heads the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, an advocacy group in New York City that has been pushing for a global debate over geoengineering governance in the United Nations.Harrison says scientists in the programme have consulted with regulatory authorities, as well as with the general public and Indigenous groups that have historic claims on the reef. He also readily acknowledges trying to avoid getting embroiled in a debate about solar geoengineering, arguing that the project would be more akin to cloud-seeding operations that are designed to promote rain and that are not considered to be geoengineering. One of the next modelling efforts, however, will be to explore any potential regional and global implications, he says.

A plume of seawater droplets rises up into the sky during a field trial in March 2021.Credit: Brendan Kelaher/SCU

Others question the Australian government’s motivations in funding such work. Under the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, the government has yet to strengthen its climate pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement, as many nations have done in the past year. Morrison has personally ruled out committing to net-zero emissions. Pushing for a technological fix to global warming without moving to aggressively curb greenhouse gases is “sheer lunacy”, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Some researchers, however, are pleased to see marine cloud brightening move from theory to the field, including US scientists working on a similar project that has been struggling to get into the field for nearly a decade. “This is an early example of how climate disruption can drive interest in these things,” says Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric physicist who manages the Marine Cloud Brightening Project at the University of Washington in Seattle. Members of the team provided the initial nozzle design and have been tracking the Australian group’s progress.Coral crisisThe first time that scientists observed a major bleaching event along the Great Barrier Reef was in 1998, and the second event followed four years later. In both cases, corals expelled the algae that live within them and that provide colour and energy through photosynthesis. Most of the corals eventually recovered. But in 2016 and 2017, many corals bleached and then died across two-thirds of the reef.
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“It was absolutely horrifying,” says David Wachenfeld, chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which manages the reef. The clear message from those events was that the traditional approach to managing corals and coral reefs would not be enough, he adds. “Our hand was forced.”In 2018, the Australian government allocated Aus$6 million to a consortium of universities and government research institutes for a feasibility study focused on potentially radical strategies that could be applied across the reef. Researchers reviewed some 160 ideas, including putting live corals on ice for long-term preservation and synthetically engineeering new varieties that can tolerate the warmer waters. Many approaches proved too costly and energy intensive, but 43 interventions were singled out for further study. Marine cloud brightening drew support in part because it theoretically provides direct relief precisely when and where corals need it most.Much of the emphasis of the programme is on helping corals to adapt and repopulate the reef, including efforts to improve coral aquaculture operations so that they can produce millions of corals per year rather than thousands. For Madeleine van Oppen, a coral geneticist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science near Townsville, the RRAP programme helps to integrate her team’s work on assisting coral evolution to make them more heat tolerant.Thanks to the RRAP, she says, data from those projects are now being fed directly into models that enable researchers to assess the potential benefits — as well as the risks — of releasing new strains of coral and microalga into the wild. The programme is also raising ecological questions, such as whether the introduction of new coral species can propagate disease, or whether a new variety of more heat-tolerant corals might displace corals struggling to survive.

Researchers are testing specialized nozzles that create jets of seawater mist.Credit: Alejandro Tagliafico/SCU

“It sort of speeds up the whole path from research to implementation in the field,” says van Oppen.In the long run, the models indicate that without interventions, the extent of coral on the reef could shrink by well over 60% by 2070 compared with 2020 levels (S. A. Condie et al. R. Soc. Open Sci. 8, 201296; 2021). But simulations suggest that Australia could cut those losses in half with a three-pronged approach focused on propagating heat-tolerant corals, controlling outbreaks of the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish and brightening clouds to take the edge off of heat waves. Crucially, the latest modelling also suggests that without the cooling provided by Harrison’s cloud brightening project, the other interventions might not amount to much.Testing the windWhen Harrison’s group returned to the field this year, they had more-powerful drones as well as other aerosol sensors on a second boat. As in the previous year’s experiment, each time they created a plume, it rose into the sky after the droplets lost around 90% of their water to evaporation. The likely explanation, Harrison says, is that the reef is creating its own weather as warm water along the shallow corals heats the air above.Many more droplets are making it into the clouds than the scientists had initially calculated, but Harrison says their mist machine might need to be scaled up by a factor of 10 — from 320 to around 3,000 nozzles — to produce enough particles to brighten nearby clouds by around 30%. His team’s modelling suggests that this could in turn reduce the incoming solar radiation on the reef locally by around 6.5%. Even then, the operation would require 800–1,000 stations to cover the length of the Great Barrier Reef.
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But it’s unclear whether that spray of salty droplets will have the desired effect, says Lynn Russell, an atmospheric chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who has studied cloud brightening. Russell has not seen the latest — and as-yet unpublished — results, but questions whether there are enough of the low layered clouds considered suitable for cloud brightening.Harrison acknowledges such concerns and says that his team sees more of these clouds on the southern part of the reef. His team’s modelling suggests the technology will also work on the clouds that are common across the rest of the reef in summer. Even then, he says, it remains unclear how much coverage a full-scale cloud-brightening operation could provide across the entirety of the reef. More measurements, and detailed modelling, are needed to provide answers.For now, Harrison has secured funding for another two years, and he needs to demonstrate progress. The RRAP is testing all 43 approaches and will redistribute resources to projects that show potential, Robillot says. But he stresses that no amount of science and engineering will preserve the reef in its current form. “Even if we do all of this, the system that you’ll end up with is not going to be the Great Barrier Reef that we know today,” Robillot says. “You might, however, retain a very functional ecosystem.”That’s enough to keep Harrison going, and his team is already preparing for a trip into the field in 2022. The scientists plan to run the mist machine at higher pressure, which should produce a sixfold increase in the number of particles, and they will use new instrumentation to determine how particles alter clouds. They are also investigating an entirely different nozzle technology that could reduce the number of nozzles needed by a factor of 1,000.Harrison is more confident today than he was even a year ago that cloud brightening might work over the reef, but he is also realistic about the future if governments fail to limit carbon emissions. “There are only so many clouds available, and there is only so much you can brighten them,” he says. “Eventually, climate change just overwhelms things.”

Nature 596, 476-478 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02290-3

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