A Genomic Framework for Climate-Resilient Conservation

Effective climate-resilient ecosystem management requires predictive tools that link genomic variation with future environmental conditions, yet, translating such forecasts into actionable conservation strategies remains a major challenge. Here, we present an integrative framework to guide climate-resilient coral conservation by combining genomic offset modeling, predictive allele shift analysis, and experimental validation. Using a high-resolution SNP dataset from the reef-building coral Platygyra daedalea spanning the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf, we identified four distinct genetic clusters and environmentally associated loci likely under selection. We then predicted population-specific allele frequency changes under future ocean warming scenarios and experimentally validated these forecasts via a larval heat stress experiment. The direction of allele shifts observed in the experiment was consistent with predicted changes at loci under selection. Finally, we estimated the number of migrants required to induce adaptive allele shifts and show that even modest assisted gene flow may be sufficient to drive climate-aligned genomic change. Our findings bridge the gap between population genomics and practical conservation planning by identifying actionable genetic targets for assisted evolution and demonstrating their feasibility through empirical testing.