Abstract Summary
Southeast Florida has no shortage of coastal construction projects with permit-required avoidance and minimization efforts to move scleractinian corals out of harm’s way, and mitigation for anticipated project impacts. The authors propose a novel data organization and visualization tool for use with coral minimization/mitigation data to help inform, plan, and implement the most successful coral reef restoration activities possible. Successful restoration projects require the issue that caused the need for restoration to be ameliorated. As such, existing private sector-collected minimization/mitigation data can be used to help inform coral reef management agencies about location and species specific coral health conditions prior to conducting restoration activities. These already-existing datasets can be crucial to making the best informed decision regarding a restoration project, particularly in light of the current coral disease outbreak in southeast Florida, current coral bleaching plight in Australia, and similar coral issues occurring worldwide. This presentation will provide concrete examples of coastal construction projects requiring coral minimization/mitigation, and the potential for use of those and similar data sources, to help inform the planning and successful implementation of coral reef restoration projects. It will also touch on restoration projects that, had they been informed by available minimization/mitigation data, could have avoided issues and perhaps have been deemed more successful. This presentation will serve as a call-out to other environmental consulting firms to join efforts to provide existing minimization/mitigation datasets, and will propose a process, without reinventing the wheel, to share such data for the benefit of coral reef restoration practitioners and managers. The authors hope that the presentation results in a side-bar meeting during the conference to garner feedback on the proposed process, as well as conversations with coral reef management agencies that perform restoration activities regarding their desired functionality for a data visualization tool for informing coral reef restoration projects. We hope to forge a new public-private partnership within the Coral Reef Consortium and start the conversation of how existing information can be better utilized to inform logistical applications and decision-making to conserve these natural resources from their current dire state.
