The increasing pressure on Earth's ecosystems due to climate change is becoming more and more evident and the impacts of climate change are especially visible on coral reefs. Understanding how climate change interacts with the physical environment of reefs to impact coral growth and reef development is critically important to predicting the persistence of reefs into the future. In this study, a biophysical model was developed including four environmental factors in a feedback loop with the coral's biology: (1) light; (2) hydrodynamics; (3) temperature; and (4) pH. The submodels are online coupled, i.e. regularly exchanging information and feedbacks while the model runs. This ensures computational efficiency despite the widely-ranged timescales. The composed biophysical model provides a significant step forward in understanding the processes that modulate the evolution of coral reefs, as it is the first construction of a model in which the hydrodynamics are included in the feedback loop.

气候变化对地球生态系统造成的压力越来越大，气候变化对珊瑚礁的影响尤为明显。了解气候变化如何与珊瑚礁的物理环境相互作用以影响珊瑚生长和珊瑚礁发育对于预测未来珊瑚礁的持久性至关重要。在这项研究中，开发了一个生物物理模型，包括珊瑚生物学反馈回路中的四个环境因素：（1）光；(2) 流体力学；(3) 温度；(4) pH。子模型在线耦合，即在模型运行时定期交换信息和反馈。尽管时间跨度很大，这仍可确保计算效率。