Prestigious funding for coral research and historic maritime trade project

The University of Southampton has been awarded over €9m (£8m) for three major research projects. Two will investigate corals and our warming climate – the third will delve into the history of maritime trade in Europe.

European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants are among the most prestigious and competitive research awards in the world, supporting established researchers with exceptional track records in pursuing ambitious, groundbreaking five year projects.

The University’s Professor Gavin Foster is set to receive a €3.4m (£3m) grant for the ‘UNLOCK’ project which will help scientists more accurately understand how the skeletons of tropical corals record the environment they experienced when alive.

Researchers will measure, for the first time, the chemical and isotopic composition of calcifying fluid which corals secrete to form their skeletons. This is only possible thanks to novel cryo-analytical techniques the team will develop.

“Compositional variations in coral skeletons are widely used as proxies of past environmental change, but these reconstructions are complicated by life processes that influence the composition of the calcifying fluid and hence the skeleton,” says Professor Foster. “These new observations will allow UNLOCK to deliver palaeoclimate reconstructions over centuries and millennia with unprecedented accuracy, improving our understanding of the preindustrial climate and the scale of anthropogenic climate change.”

Head of the University of Southampton’s Coral Reef Laboratory , Professor Jörg Wiedenmann , has won €3.3m (£2.9m) to investigate a fundamental aspect of coral biology – how the main reef builders cope with different temperature environments.

Leading the ‘Symbiolink’ project, he will explore connections between the microscopic organisms that live within corals, and coral health, nutrition and resistance to heat stress. The project will examine why reefs can exist at very different temperatures across the Earth’s oceans, helping to identify conditions that may support future reef persistence.

“Coral reefs around the world are under increasing pressure from rising ocean temperatures, causing widespread coral bleaching and threatening ecosystems. We know some corals are more resilient to heat than others, but the biological processes influencing this are still not well understood,” comments Professor Wiedenmann. “Our research will help inform future conservation efforts to protect reef ecosystems.”

Historian Professor Craig Lambert has secured €2.8m (£2.4m) to lead international research into how maritime trade connected Europe in the past and helped shape the modern world.

‘Uncharted Maritime Worlds (UMW): An Integrated Digital History of Seaborne Trade from European Archives’, brings together the University’s historians ( Dr John Mcaleer ), electronics and computer science experts ( Professor Stuart Middleton ) and the members of the GeoData Institute .

It will reconstruct the complex networks of ships, merchants, ports, commodities, and communities that connected Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries.

"For generations, historians have been constrained by the fragmented nature of surviving evidence. Advances in Artificial Intelligence now allow us to combine millions of records from archives across Europe and ask entirely new questions about how people, goods, and ideas moved across the continent," says Professor Lambert. “Our expertise in history, AI, and geospatial analysis, will enable us to uncover the hidden networks that connected Europe and helped shape the world we see today.”

The award places Southampton at the forefront of international research into the application of artificial intelligence and digital technologies within the humanities.

Commenting on these awards, University of Southampton Vice-President (Research & Enterprise), Professor Mark Spearing said: “ERC Advanced Grants are highly coveted by academics throughout Europe and the process is extremely competitive. Receiving funding for three in one round is a tremendous achievement and demonstrates the quality and depth of research at our university. Congratulations to all those involved.”

ERC Advanced Grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, supporting established research leaders pursuing ambitious projects with the potential to achieve significant scientific and scholarly breakthroughs.