Abstract Summary
Coral communities are productive ecosystems and are recognized for their wide distribution. In the Mexican Pacific there is a relatively low diversity of coral species, but they are adapted to thermal anomalies that under normal conditions cause bleaching. Despite having suffered damage from the strong events of El Niño in 1997 and 2015, the corals have maintained a slow but steady recovery and the species of the genus Pocillopora, which are the main reef builders, stand out. For this reason, a restoration based on this type of coral may be a way to improve the ecosystem conditions. In the Espiritu Santo Archipelago National Park, a restoration program was initiated implementing different methods and they were compared to define which is more successful. 200 naturally generated coral fragments of the genus Pocillopora were recovered and fastened to the bottom with plastic and epoxy resin straps. The colonies were followed from November 2017 to July 2018 to estimate their growth and survival rates, and with these data a predictive model was generated to know temporal trends. The average growth of the surface covered by each fragment was 23.57 cm2 per year, with the straps method having the highest growth (28.05 cm2/year vs. 19.89 cm2/year). The survival of the fragments was 73%, and mortality was higher in fixed corals with straps (32%) than in resin (22%), although the daily mortality rates were not significantly different. Because the strapping method proved to be more efficient because the corals showed greater growth, it is suggested as the most suitable method to apply in a large-scale coral restoration. Finally, a model that incorporated the average mortality and growth rates indicates that a theoretical cohort of initial corals would reach the maximum coverage between 3 and 4 years, but then the living surface would decrease until it was the same as the original after 15 years. This indicates that a successful restoration effort should ideally repeat the placement of fragments every 3 years, to maintain the maximum level of recovery.
