Reef restoration programs require a supply of coral colonies for their implementation. Most of these efforts obtain colonies from the natural environment, limiting production goals. Recently, marine nurseries being established to propagate corals and to keep a stock available for out-planting them i...

The Reef Resilience Network connects marine resource managers with information, experts, resources, and skill-building opportunities to accelerate and leverage solutions for improved conservation and restoration of coral reefs around the world. The Network is a partnership led by The Nature Conserva...

Populations of elkhorn coral, Acropora palmata, have declined over 90% in their Caribbean range since the 1980s. Due to their importance as ecosystem engineers and their ability to structurally stabilize reef environments, establishing a regional mapping and monitoring program was crucial to determi...

Researchers were tasked with developing a novel method of antibiotic delivery to a submerged mucosal membrane over an extended release profile between 15-72 hours to be used for field application on scleractinian corals affected by Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. Studies were conducted using dissol...

In The Bahamas, effective restoration of coral populations to achieve species recovery is likely to require restoration efforts on large scales at multiple sites. While scientists and conservation NGOs are conducting experimental coral restoration at a number of sites and have demonstrated the effec...

Short video on Project Coral from the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

CLEAR Caribbean has been implementing coral restoration projects inside marine protected areas in St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines in partnership with local communities and the private sector. Several nurseries were established in 2017 for Acropora palmata and Acropora cervicornis and outp...

Signatures of disease resistance for the threatened Caribbean branching coral, Acropora palmata. Ben Young1*, Xaymara Serrano2, Margaret Miller3, Stephanie Rosales4,5, and Nikki Traylor-Knowles1 1 Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, USA 2 Environmental Br...

Historical temperature variability and past exposure to heat stress have been found in recent studies to be key factors contributing to coral reef resilience. With future heat stress predicted to become more frequent and severe, prioritizing sites with locally higher variability and lower warming tr...

While the coral gardening framework has previously focused on the propagation and outplanting of fast-growing branching species like Acropora spp, the recently adopted microfragging technique has allowed practitioners to expand the restoration toolbox to include massive and encrusting coral species....

Globally, coral reefs are in decline. The intensity and frequency of disturbances have pushed coral reefs close to their thermal tolerance limit, causing over half of the world’s coral to die (Hughes et al., 2018). Yet, coral reefs form the foundations of the most diverse marine ecosystem on th...

The ability to monitor the growth and survival of a restored coral is vital for assessing the success of a restoration program as a whole. Information on outplant performance is useful to restoration managers to direct future operations as well as to scientists using such coral to understand ecologi...

Microfragmentation is a technique recently developed to accelerate the growth of coral colonies in culture, through cuts of less than 1 cm², with high regenerative capacity. The production of microfragments of the same genotype allows the fusion during their growth, which offers an advantage to inc...

The spatial context in which species interactions occur strongly influences an ecosystem’s resilience and ability to recover after disturbance events. Therefore, understanding how spatial interactions impact coral growth, recruitment, and diversity is of paramount importance when restoring a degra...

The Florida Reef Tract (FRT) is the third-largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world, extending from the St. Lucie Inlet in Martin County to the Dry Tortugas. In 2014, an unidentified coral ‘tissue-loss’ disease was first observed in Miami-Dade County and quickly spread throughout the northern ...

Most coral nurseries focus on in-water growing of fast-growing branching species to relatively small sizes for outplanting; the State of Hawaii has recently implemented an innovative program which combines collection of small (10 cm) live massive forms of coral colonies (mostly from within public ha...

Worldwide coral transplantation efforts are being undertaken to restore reefs lost to climate change-induced bleaching and disease. Successful reef restoration efforts to date are limited to shallow depths above 10 meters with fast growing corals, despite the loss of many coral species across a wide...