Abstract Summary
In Hawaii, much of the State’s Coral Restoration Nursery’s activities and its out-planting of large coral colony modules is currently being funded through either settlements from Responsible Parties for unplanned coral reef impact cases in State waters, or through cooperatively-derived mitigation or offsets for impacts to coastal and nearshore marine habitats for planned activities such as dredging, coastal development, submerged habitat modification, etc. This is accomplished through an innovative coral ecological services and function tool developed by the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources and used to evaluate both planned and unplanned impact sites relative to coral colony size, form, rarity and endemism; along with subhabitat-type substrates that the colonies occur on. In a similar fashion, the same tool can be used to plan the amount of restoration required to be outplanted to offset the planned loss or to compensate for the lost services and functions from an unplanned event. The complete annual costs of running the Coral Restoration Nursery (along with coral acquisition, baseline survey costs of both determined impact and outplant sites, outplanting costs and monitoring costs) are then divided by the total number of coral colony modules that can be annually produced to get a per-colony module cost. The sum costs of the total modules required to be outplanted determines the mitigation project costs; such a method is easily transferable to other jurisdictions looking to fund both restoration and mitigation activities. This poster presentation will walk you through the process and show how the restoration targets are derived based on the impacts incurred.
