Gerard F Ricardo Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting 2023

Gerard F Ricardo

My research focuses on factors that disrupt marine invertebrate reproduction and impact ecosystem recovery. I completed my Masters by Research at the University of Wollongong, and PhD at the University of Western Australia, and have previously been employed at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (ReefHQ), James Cook University, and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Postdoc) before commencing my current position in the Marine Spatial Ecology Lab at UQ. I draw from ecotoxicology, ecology and environmental management principles to design laboratory and field experiments with the goal of deriving pressure-response thresholds and identifying cause-effect pathways. While my focus has predominantly been on local stressors and pollutants, I am also interested in ecological questions that are useful for a more applied context, such as coral restoration. My current work aims to understand the natural limits to early coral recovery; specifically, Allee effects that occur during coral reproduction when population densities are low and degraded.