Additional co-authors: Gabriel Juarez, Bruce Fouke, Forest Rower, and Linda Wegley. Materials scientists are engineers who study how synthetic and natural materials interact with their environment, whether that be mechanical, chemical, electrical, thermal, optical, magnetic, or even biological. They...

The impacts of hurricanes and tropical storms on coral reef organisms have been well documented. Impacts of storms on reefs have ranged from minor to devastating, with extreme cases resulting in the destruction of the reef framework. Taxa with shallow distributions and branching morphologies like th...

Mooring and boundary buoys, semi-permanent anchoring devices, prevent anchor damage while controlling activities and access to coral reefs. This system of passive protection can be utilized by commercial and recreational boaters/divers in place of anchoring near or on coral reefs and associated sens...

As coral reefs continue to decline due to climate change and other stressors, scientists have proposed adopting genomic tools, such as biomarkers, to aid in conservation and restoration of these threatened ecosystems. Biomarkers are easily measured indicators of higher-order biological processes tha...

Coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean have faced significant declines for the last 30 years. In recent years, coral restoration practices have focused on a limited number of species, chiefly Acropora cervicornis, and there is a growing need to add mounding and boulder corals to a multi-species re...

To increase genetic diversity, coral restoration needs to use sexual reproduction. However, post-settlement mortality of sexually-produced corals in nature and ex situ nurseries is typically high due to macroalgal overgrowth and sensitivity to physical parameters that are optimal for adults, such as...

Current outplanting methods for coral restoration require labor-intensive manual transplantation of each coral-substrate-unit using adhesives, nails or cable-ties. To conduct coral restoration at the needed scale, SECORE is co-leading a collaboration (with TNC and California Academy of Sciences; the...

Gulf of Mannar is one of the four major coral reef areas in India. Out of an area of 110 km2, 32 km2 has been degraded due mainly to mining and destructive fishing practices. Low-tech and low-cost transplantation techniques using artificial substrates like concrete frames and fish houses were standa...

Coral reefs are frequently impacted by storms and vessel groundings. As a result of these impacts, thousands of corals are often broken, dislodged, and flipped over. These loose fragments and corals are subject to continual abrasion, scour, and sedimentation, which ultimately result in death. Unchec...

Conference Theme: Restoration Operations: best practices, techniques and tools for scaling up Scaling up coral production for restoration and lowering the costs for out-planting: New techniques and alternatives Aquaculture production for marine organisms has always evolved using a three step system ...

Coral reef restoration techniques through coral gardening suffer a founder effect. As in the population genetics concept, a small population of pioneers who initiated restoration at a specific region develop the in situ (ocean) nurseries and outplanting (transplantation) methods. The techniques deve...

The coral reefs of Florida and the Caribbean have seen upwards of 95% decline in hard coral cover over the last several decades. This decline has been attributed to multiple, compounding, anthropogenic factors including but not limited to climate change, water pollution, and overfishing. This unprec...

Hurricanes are known to cause damage to coral reefs through dislodgement, substrate destabilization, and mortality. The effects of hurricanes on coral nurseries, however, remains poorly understood. As the number of coral restoration projects grows and projected frequency of hurricanes increases acro...

Millions of dollars have been invested in restoring the Florida reef tract by ‘re-seeding’ reefs with nursery raised corals. However, both wild and nursery raised corals must survive significant environmental changes and extensive threats within the reef environment in order to reproduce and con...

Reef restoration efforts show successful results in many parts of the ocean. Scale, however, has been very limited. Unfortunately reef degradation and destruction rates are going faster than expected. Scaling up restoration projects are needed to contravene the destruction tendency. The National Ins...

Coral nurseries have expanded throughout the Caribbean, and many now have the ability to outplant tens of thousands of corals annually. Nevertheless, these efforts are inadequate to address coral losses from bleaching, disease, hurricanes and other stressors due to resource and capacity limitations,...

Coral reef ecosystems are under increasing pressure by multiple stressors that degrade reef condition and function. Although improved management systems have yielded benefits in many regions, broad-scale declines continue and additional practical and effective solutions for reef conservation and man...

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 p...

Defining the location and condition of coastal habitats, including coral reef, mangroves, and seagrass, is essential for effective protection and management of these invaluable ecosystems. Producing detailed habitat maps over large spatial scales, however, has traditionally required large capital in...

Coral propagation efforts for restoration and species recovery in Puerto Rico have increased over the last few decades from a few scattered pilot projects to sustained nursery operations producing thousands of corals annually for outplanting. We report on an effort to scale-up propagation using in-s...

St. Martin island is the only coral habitat in Bangladesh although the status is not good due to heavy anthropological impact, mostly from tourism in recent years. other than the climatic factors locally man-made factors posing the biggest threats to coral habitat and also making coral conservation ...

In Florida, coral reefs have experienced up to a 98% loss in the populations of Acropora coral. This decline can be attributed to multiple compounding factors including overfishing, poor water quality, extreme water temperatures, and the loss of herbivores. As these threats continue - and potentiall...

Coral reefs are being severely damaged worldwide. Coral restoration has been implemented to ameliorate such degradation and increase coral cover. In the last decade restoration of branching corals have been widely implemented and popularized that even non-expert citizens do it globally. Yet there ar...

Currently the Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture of Mexico develops the program of reef restoration in Quintana Roo. With 10 years of work in the development of biotechnology, it has been possible to consolidate a multifunctional system for coral cultivation that includes hatcheries and nurserie...

The Florida Aquarium has consistently increased success in larval propagation in several species of Western Atlantic stony corals with approximately 50% survival after one year in the most recent years. Culture conditions were optimized through construction of aquarium systems specifically for this ...

Active coral reef restoration is a fast-growing area of research around the world. The largest projects emerged from a need to accelerate the repopulation of threatened species in the Caribbean. With the increasing threat of climate change, restoration is rapidly becoming a platform for incorporatin...

Coral reefs have degraded drastically in recent decades. The impact of anthropogenic activities, in synergy with the effects of global climate change, has led to the decrease of coral coverage and the loss of roughness of the calcareous matrix, which reduces the three-dimensional structure of the re...

Acropora palmata is one of the major reef-building species in the Caribbean, however it is considered endangered due to global and local threats. Efforts to remedy its status have recently focused on restoration programs using sexual recruits to maintain or increase genetic diversity. Our objective ...

With the rapid decline of coral reefs across the globe, the pressure is on to make reef restoration scalable. Current outplanting methods confront three main bottlenecks: 1) a turbulent working environment, 2) inefficient multi-step protocols, and 3) time-consuming and physically demanding steps. Im...

Nonprofits, like all organizations, have goals and deadlines to accomplish; simultaneously, nonprofits are often more limited in their resources, both financially and in personnel. To overcome this daunting but essential challenge, a volunteer force can help increase the capacity of work a nonprofit...