Abstract Summary
Conventional coral reef conservation and management has been reliant on natural recovery processes following management actions to remove stressors. This approach is characterized by a laudable precautionary principle to ‘do no harm’ and to minimize intervention in natural processes. As active propagation and population enhancement measures have been deemed appropriate, this precautionary principle has been expressed in the ‘local is best’ approach for sourcing restoration stocks, or provenancing. However, in the current anthropocene era of rapid environmental change, adequate removal of stressors to allow recovery and persistence appears infeasible in most coral reef settings, attested to by observed drastic coral declines. Hence, increasing calls are heard to devise and implement restoration and management strategies that proactively maximize the adaptive capacities of species and communities, rather than conserving their historic state. Evolutionary theory identifies large effective population size, high connectedness and gene flow, and maximizing the standing genetic variation in populations (especially as relates to functionally adaptive traits) as key aspects to improve evolutionary resilience. Restoration, with some emphasis on sexual processes, can clearly play a key role in enhancing these population characteristics. However, exclusively local provenancing is not the way to maximize standing adaptive genetic variation in restored populations. This presentation will review alternative provenancing strategies that are expected to improve adaptive capacity of coral populations.
