Across the greater Caribbean and Florida there are a growing number of programs aiding in the enhancement of coral reefs through coral propagation. As new programs begin or established programs scale-up their efforts there is a need to provide guidance through best management practices and lessons learned to increase or accelerate a program’s success. A priority for the field-based propagation and monitoring working groups of the Coral Restoration Consortium was to synthesize, update, and develop best management practices for a broad field of restoration practitioners. As this field continues to scale-up through an increase in number of colonies, species or locations it is important to tailor these guides to all levels of a program; from start-up to scale-up. Current guides and practices, published materials, and knowledge from practitioners were gathered to assimilate the most up-to-date best management practices ranging from how to start a nursery program to how to monitor a large-scale restoration effort. Our goal is to provide practitioners with a platform from which they can learn from the successes and failures of others so we can collaboratively work towards restoring our reefs. The best management practices developed herein will be hosted online providing easy access and the ability to update quickly and frequently as the field continues to grow and change. We will present our progress to date including an unveiling of the online platform.

On Febuary 5th 2010, the Vogetrader ship ran aground on a coral reef off the south west shore of O’ahu, HI resulting in a settlement to provide funding for compensatory coral reef restoration projects. Previous successful emergency restoration efforts have focused on the reattachment of corals that have been dislodged during grounding events. These corals of opportunity are also naturally occurring in the environment and can be used as source material for future restoration efforts. In rubble reef areas around O’ahu Hawai’i, coral colonies that settle and grow on unconsolidated substrate can become naturally overturned during surge events, causing tissue loss, bleaching, and eventually mortality. However, if these corals are transferred to a stable coral nursery platform and allowed to recover, the colonies could be used as donor material to restore damaged reefs with minimal impacts to donor areas. The Reef Runway Coral Nursery, deployed in May 2018, was designed to aid in coral restoration efforts in response to reef injuries by harboring corals of opportunity and creating a stock-pile of donor material for future out planting. This presentation will highlight the design, creation and implementation of the nursery structure as well as a cost analysis of the project. Overall, this new coral nursery concept integrates previously used techniques as well as novel methods to face the unique challenges and resources of coral reef restoration in Hawai’i. The Reef Runway Coral Nursery has incredible potential and could prove to be a highly beneficial and cost effective tool for coral restoration.

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 potentially worsen – there is a clear need for innovative methods to help abate stressors on coral reefs. Active coral restoration (or population enhancement) has emerged as the primary method to manage the loss of coral reef habitat and potentially reverse population decline for specific geographic regions. While there are many restoration organizations using diverse of techniques, coral restoration practices remain relatively new, understudied, and poised to benefit from focused attention to improve scalability. For active coral restoration to be impactful at a large scale, restoration techniques must increase the capacity to produce, outplant and track corals through the restoration process. The field of coral restoration will continue to evolve as techniques improve and our collective insight becomes shared amongst managers, restoration practitioners and researchers. It is the purpose of this white paper to share the lessons learned and techniques developed by the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF) as we scaled our nursery and outplanting efforts 10-fold over 3 years in order to engage restoration practice at ecologically meaningful scales. In October 2013, CRF was awarded a three-year grant for coral reef restoration from the NOAA Restoration Center, Office of Habitat Conservation (award number NA13NMF4630144). Supported in part by this grant, CRF was able to develop both the techniques and the infrastructure needed to support coral restoration efforts on an order of magnitude higher than previous projects. Herein, we highlight the most significant lessons learned in order to assist other restoration groups in their expansion of techniques for scalable Acropora restoration projects. Our goal is to share what we learned in order to promote the enhancement and success of large-scale coral restoration efforts.

Restoring coral populations on degraded reefs using nursery grown corals is an evolving science and an art. A variety of in situ coral nursery and outplanting techniques have been developed around the world in an attempt to “restore” degraded reefs. These techniques often employ a larger central nursery array which supplies nursery reared corals for projects meters to kilometers from the production array. Nursery grow-out may take up to a year, involving regular maintenance, including removal of fouling organisms and flotsam. Once grown to a reef-ready state per the programmatic approach, the corals are removed from the nursery structure, in whole or in part, and transported to the restoration site, where they are then secured to the target substrate using adhesives or cements, nails, fishing line, cable ties, or by simply jamming them into reef crevices. Although these techniques are effective, they are often costly and labor intensive, making it difficult to scale them up to have a meaningful restoration impact in many areas. Because the goal of most restoration projects is to return the site to its pre-impacted state, the limited capacity of most programs results in restoration projects have been successful only on relatively small spatial scales. We propose that a new goal for reef restoration programs be to develop the capacity to restore reefs at landscape scales. In this presentation we will outline a new strategy to significantly scale-up restoration activities by streamlining nursery maintenance, coral transport, and outplanting to the reef. A key component of this concept is developing temporary, biodegradable nursery structures that serve as both nursery and outplanting structure in one. Such “pop-up” nurseries will be developed for branching, massive and soft-coral morphologies, and the specific designs can be modified to take into account the physical conditions at the site (currents, tides and sea conditions), and the consolidation, orientation and topographic complexity of the planting substrate. The ultimate goal of these structures is to produce and outplant large numbers of corals at a minimal effort and cost.