Abstract Summary
Biscayne National Park, located in Miami’s back yard, protects extensive mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, the northernmost Florida Keys, and a portion of the Florida Keys Reef Tract. Status as a national park offers a level of protection from some local stressors, yet the park’s proximity to the Miami metropolitan area provides its own set of challenges. Over the past fifteen years, the National Park Service has engaged in sustained intensive reef restoration efforts, with support from damage assessment case settlements and grants and through key partnerships. Most visitors enjoy the park by boat, and park waters support active trap fisheries. The park’s Habitat Restoration Program addresses direct impacts to reef resources from vessel strikes, vessel debris, derelict fishing gear, and storms, as well as indirect effects that have drastically reduced coral populations. The scale, complexity, and ecological benefit of reef restoration efforts in the park continue to grow in parallel with advances in the field. Examples of substrate stabilization, reef habitat reconstruction, debris removal, and coral population enhancement through nursery collaborations and larval propagation will be presented. This body of work has helped to advance restoration concepts from the research realm to practical and ecological meaningful scales. Active restoration measures that conserve the park’s existing reef resources and build diverse coral populations are critical to their continued existence in a changing future.
