Professor Terry Hughes, ARC Centre Director, named among Nature’s Top 10 ‘Researchers Who Mattered’

In December 2016, the prestigious science journal, Nature, named Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, Professor Terry Hughes, as one of the elite list of ‘top ten people who mattered’ in the world for his ground-breaking coral reef research.

When the first signs of bleaching conditions began to occur in early 2016, Professor Hughes convened the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce to coordinate a response at a national level. The taskforce was composed of over 300 scientists from 10 research institutions across Australia, including all four nodes of the ARC Centre of Excellence, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Professor Hughes led teams of scientists to conduct aerial and underwater surveys across 2,300kms of the Great Barrier Reef, documenting the severity of bleaching caused by global warming. Videos and images taken by the survey teams captured worldwide attention when the severity of the bleaching became apparent. Severe bleaching was found to have affected 81 per cent of the coral in the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef coral.

In 2017, Professor Hughes and his team followed up on their research findings with a Nature article ‘Coral reefs in the Anthropocene’, a solutions-oriented paper that asks the question, What do we have to do to save the world’s coral reefs? In the paper, they explain that the window of opportunity to save coral reefs remains open and the global challenge now is to steer reefs into the future, to ensure that they remain biologically functional, and retain their ability to support the livelihoods and well-being of the hundreds of millions of people who depend on them.

	Prestigious science journal, Nature, described Professor Terry Hughes as a ‘reef sentinel’ for keeping watch over one of Australia’s most precious icons.

 

Image: ©Tane Sinclair-Taylor / tane-sinclair-taylor.com. Image courtesy: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.