The Great Barrier Reef is a global icon facing unprecedented pressure from climate change, back-to-back bleaching and Australia’s historical attachment to coal. Securing the public debate over the long-term health of the reef is a battle between environmental advocacy groups and industrial growth....

We are working in Belize to restore the full suite of coral reef attributes and services on shallow lagoonal reefs and reef crests. Here, acroporid replacement works at otherwise recalcitrant sites, with results similar to nearby natural regeneration. Success is greatest in shallow waters when coole...

Corals are dying at an unprecedented rate and concurrently natural ecosystem processes on reefs are being degraded. Many restoration efforts focus on increasing the abundance of corals and fish, but fail to restore some of the processes necessary for the persistence of reefs. Coral recruitment is a ...

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...

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...

Ocean acidification (OA) can lead to dissolution of coral skeletons as well as impacting general health and physiology. This can be detrimental to ongoing coral restoration efforts. Seagrass meadows, sometimes found adjacent to coral reefs, are mostly net autotrophic as a carbon sink and use excess ...

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...

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...

Scientists and reef practitioners have been scrambling to discover new techniques to combat global coral degradation. Coral restoration is still a developing field, and many innovations and improvements are necessary for long-term success and conservation. The growing attention towards restoration h...

The National Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture of Mexico (INAPESCA) works on a project for development biotechnology to produce coral colonies and implement actions for reef restoration. The project began in 2009; an aquarium system with controlled conditions (SCC) and small modules of marine n...

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...

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...

The widespread decline of coral reefs stems from a variety of local and global stressors affecting reef structure and function. Much attention has been paid to restoring stony corals as the architects of reef structure. However, in the Mesoamerican Reef coral cover has increased over the last decade...

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...

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...

The mass mortality of Diadema antillarum throughout the Caribbean in 1983-4 resulted in decreased herbivory and an increase in abundance of macroalgae on coral reefs in the region. This project intends to increase population densities of Diadema antillarum on reefs in Puerto Rico by releasing lab cu...

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...

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...

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 ...

For 10 years we have been conducting experimental coral restoration effort in the Bahamas through direct transplantation and outplanting of from nurseries using Acropora spp. and other species. An important part of these efforts from their start has been the development of a hierarchical monitoring ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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...

Coral restoration projects have been established to facilitate the recovery of coral throughout the Florida Keys. To optimize coral restoration success, identifying the ecological conditions and habitats that promote coral survival need to be identified. Since herbivory is one of the most important ...

Population declines of Acropora cervicornis, largely a result of bleaching and disease, led to its 2006 listing as Threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. Unfortunately, natural recovery of populations through fragment regeneration and sexual recruitment remains inadequate to offset populati...

Intervention strategies to create “climate smart” corals for restoration include manipulating the association between corals and their algal symbionts. In adult corals, “stress-hardening” through controlled bleaching and recovery can shift symbiont assemblages in favor of thermally-tolerant ...

Recent back-to-back episodes of heat-induced coral bleaching in Florida and elsewhere have driven the need to test interventions that increase the resilience of restored corals to anticipated future warming. One potential intervention is the application of sublethal doses of bleaching stress to indu...