Coral reefs across the planet are threatened by the rising temperatures associated with climate change. Not only do we simply need to better understand what we have to lose, but we must exploit unbiased approaches for ensuring that the optimal conservation or restoration approach deployed is actually the one that maximixes cost/benefit: greatest positive impact for corals and other reef-dwelling organisms per unit cost.

However, conservation decisions are normally made based on "gut feelings," and not local data (which, until recently, did not even exist in most reef areas). In this presentation, I demonstrate how easy it is to explore, and then comprehensively analyze, a large coral reef data set encompassing nearly the entire biological spatial spectrum: from the molecules with coral cells (pm to nm-scale), on to the coral colonies (cm to m-scale), through to entire coral reefs imaged from space (km to Mm-scale). I specifically showcase how the approaches used to analyze "big" molecular data sets are actually not so different from those ecologists leverage to characterize habitats and how analytical tools and techniques originally developed for molecular biologists shine when adapted for ecological data sets (and vice versa).

After using tools in JMP Pro to highlight how to visualize and analyze these complex data sets, I then demonstrate how they can be integrated to not only make powerful predictions about the future state of coral reefs, but also to confidently project which conservation approach should be implemented to ensure that the reef is effectively "climate-proofed."