The PI will assist TNC with conducting two separate culturing experiments:

1. Culturing to test ideal outplanting age. PI will collect reproductive material from two sites on Dangermond Preserve and bring it back to the lab at UC Santa Barbara. The PI will spawn offspring from the collected fertile branches and rear them within aquaculture tanks. Culturing protocols were previously developed in a trial experiment by the PI, which will be used for culturing S. compressa individuals for outplanting. The outplanting experiment will have 3 treatments, which will consist solely of different culturing lengths of time (i.e. culture for 1.5, 3, and 6 months). The PI will culture the spawned individuals for these allotted lengths of time, after which TNC partners will outplant the cultured individuals back on Dangermond Preserve. This experiment will help TNC pinpoint the optimum age of outplanting for restoration success, and guide future cost/benefit analyses of large-scale restoration efforts.
2. Culturing to test priming to increase Santa Ana Wind resilience. The priming experiment will test the hypothesis that introducing mild environmental shocks within cultures can increase the resilience of lab-grown individuals post-outplanting. The PI will grow S. compressa to the juvenile sporophyte stage following the steps described above. The PI will then conduct an experiment priming juveniles to stressors associated with Santa Ana Winds, as these have been shown to be the dominant stressor to S. compressa. This will be a short-term priming disturbance (~3 days of sub-lethal stressors, 2 days recovery). After a recovery period, primed and unprimed juvenile S. compressa will be exposed to a multi-day Santa Ana Wind event (~7 days of more intense stressors, following average SAW conditions in southern California from 1981 to 2016). At the start of the experiment, the PI will determine the number of individuals and weigh each disk. After a brief recovery at the end of the experiment, the PI will assess the change in number of individuals and percent change in growth. The PI will also measure key traits for resource acquisition and/or resistance to disturbance.