Abstract Summary
Coral reefs provide critical services to human communities worldwide such as: fisheries, costal protection and cultural benefits. In Dominical Republic (DR), as in all tropical parts over the world, the coral cover and these services are diminishing due to local and global threats; and now, we know that the local stressors reduce coral resilience to the climate change. In response, place – based strategies involve local communities and resource users in conservation and restoration programs are becoming more frequent. Here, we present an alternative income generation activity for local fishermen into the Fundación Grupo Puntacana's coral restoration project. This alternative has 2 main goal: i) to augmenting coral populations can jumpstart coral reef community recovery; and ii) to combat overfishing of herbivorous fish. Up until now, 5 ex – fishermen have been certified and have helped whit the transplanting of 6,475 m of Acropora cervicornis tissue. Also, the parrotfish fishing has been reduced annually ~14,112 kg. This strategy has proved very effective, so we are replicating it others fishing communities of the DR, and in others countries such as Honduras and Haiti.
