Ryan Gasbarro is a quantitative marine ecologist with wide-ranging interests in understanding how animal communities are structured across time and space. These broad interests have led him to conduct both field-based and computational studies on animal systems ranging from the intertidal to the deep sea. For his CCCR Postdoctoral Fellow project, Ryan is assessing the overlap between cold-water corals and marine heatwaves on the U.S. West Coast continental shelf, and using models to project potential changes in coral distributions under climate change scenarios. These outputs may be utilized to adaptively manage existing conservation boundaries (e.g. bottom-contact fishery closures) or to prioritize areas for additional protections that support the resiliency of essential seafloor habitats and associated fisheries that connect the coastal zone to the wider ocean.