When significant marine habitats such as coral reefs are damaged by vessels, a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) is typically performed to enumerate the extent of the injury and determine the appropriate scale of primary and compensatory restoration. Resource Equivalency Analysis (REA) is one tool that may be used to scale a compensatory restoration or mitigation actions from injury events. REA utilizes service-to-service scaling to estimate lost ecological services. Scaling is especially important in complex habitats such as hardbottom, which are highly variable in structure, rugosity, core species, species assemblages, and species diversity. Recovery from injury can be equally variable, with some individual resources recovering relatively quickly (years) while others may have very long recovery horizons (decades to centuries) or may never recover at all. While the benefits of REA in the damage assessment domain is well known, REA can also be a useful instrument to address known, quantifiable impacts that are expected to occur from permitted or authorized coastal construction activities. FKNMS evaluated a large transportation infrastructure project in 2015 whose methods involved impacts to the seabed from equipment and vessels across a 16-acre work corridor. The potential injury to coral and hardbottom species was calculated from the estimated footprint of impacts and species density within the construction area. Using REA, FKNMS considered the extent of injuries to and recovery characteristics of each core hardbottom component to determine the restoration needed to provide comparable resources and services to compensate for the construction losses. The resulting compensatory restoration project featured restoration using a “high-value” coral species (Acropora cervicornis) in exchange for the loss of a wide variety of hardbottom coral species. In this manner, REA can be applied in non-traditional scenarios to compensate for unavoidable resource losses and promote habitat restoration when “species for species” restoration is not an option.

Southeast Florida has no shortage of coastal construction projects with permit-required avoidance and minimization efforts to move scleractinian corals out of harm’s way, and mitigation for anticipated project impacts. The authors propose a novel data organization and visualization tool for use with coral minimization/mitigation data to help inform, plan, and implement the most successful coral reef restoration activities possible. Successful restoration projects require the issue that caused the need for restoration to be ameliorated. As such, existing private sector-collected minimization/mitigation data can be used to help inform coral reef management agencies about location and species specific coral health conditions prior to conducting restoration activities. These already-existing datasets can be crucial to making the best informed decision regarding a restoration project, particularly in light of the current coral disease outbreak in southeast Florida, current coral bleaching plight in Australia, and similar coral issues occurring worldwide. This presentation will provide concrete examples of coastal construction projects requiring coral minimization/mitigation, and the potential for use of those and similar data sources, to help inform the planning and successful implementation of coral reef restoration projects. It will also touch on restoration projects that, had they been informed by available minimization/mitigation data, could have avoided issues and perhaps have been deemed more successful. This presentation will serve as a call-out to other environmental consulting firms to join efforts to provide existing minimization/mitigation datasets, and will propose a process, without reinventing the wheel, to share such data for the benefit of coral reef restoration practitioners and managers. The authors hope that the presentation results in a side-bar meeting during the conference to garner feedback on the proposed process, as well as conversations with coral reef management agencies that perform restoration activities regarding their desired functionality for a data visualization tool for informing coral reef restoration projects. We hope to forge a new public-private partnership within the Coral Reef Consortium and start the conversation of how existing information can be better utilized to inform logistical applications and decision-making to conserve these natural resources from their current dire state.

The north of Mozambique is famous for the biodiversity of coral, specially Acropora genera. Despite climate change the region recovered well for the el Ninõ 1998 and after that was not hit. Meanwhile the 3th biggest reserves of gas where discover in deep sea, and a big LNG plant is going to be built in the mainland. The only way to bring the pipeline of gas from the ocean to mainland is across the coral barrier. This means to cut an area of coral barrier of 80m by 500-1000m to lay the pipe and cover with suitable material for the re-growing of the coral. The Lurio University was award a grant to pilot a project to grow coral for the restoration of coral reefs on top of the pipeline impact zones. The project will be run in an island (Vamizi) near the LNG plant and the research station of the university, and a village with whom the University is been working. The project consists of two phases: one, testing several culture systems with the community; the other, scaling up the culture for high production to the restoration project. We hope a third phase of restructuring the cultivation systems for aquarium business could be possible, so communities can continue to have income from the activity. All project will be accompanied by capacity building of Mozambican students in diving, coral reef studies and community working.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has used a range of coral restoration techniques over the last 25 years. Restoration efforts have focused on injuries associated with ship groundings and anchoring incidents. Lessons learned have helped refine both the technical aspects and the aesthetic and ecological values of various methods. These refinements, as well as the efforts by many others in the region have helped to advance the value and efficacy of coral restoration methodologies in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Vessel groundings and anchoring injuries can create impacts that are much larger than a vessel hull or anchor. The size of injuries incurred can vary depending on where on the reef the vessel rests, continued ground force reaction of the hull, impacts from debris, propwash, or the swing of anchor chain along the bottom. Inappropriate salvage techniques when a vessel is removed perpendicular to the incoming path or when non-floating lines are used is also problematic. Under the National Marine Sanctuaries Act (NMSA), 16 U.S.C. §1443, NOAA has the authority to seek monetary damages which include: the costs to restore, replace, or acquire the equivalent of the resources injured, lost use value, assessment, monitoring, response and enforcement costs. With those recoveries, NOAA implements primary and compensatory restoration and monitoring. NOAA has implemented a wide range of restoration techniques from replication of existing reef framework, stabilization and/or removal of rubble, to stabilization and reattachment of corals. Mid-course corrections have been needed to address larger restoration sites. Monitoring has identified more effective techniques and helped improve restoration success. The tests of time, severe weather, coral bleaching and disease often take an unforeseen toll on restoration sites as well as the uninjured areas of the reef tract. Designing restorations to fit all environmental conditions is challenging.

The counter-balancing factors of value of coral reef habitat and threats to the habitat serve to emphasize the need to address injuries to coral reefs whenever possible at whatever scale necessary. For the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS), this is as much of a driver for action as the legal requirements for addressing injuries to natural resources. However, it is the inherent variability and complexity of coral reef structure that can present challenges to the approaches used to address injuries and restore ecological services following grounding incidents. One such incident involved the impacts caused by a large steel Aid To Navigation (ATON)buoy that broke loose from its mooring and drifted across a patch reef near Cheeca Rocks Reef. Through abrading, fracturing, and dislodging, the dragging of its anchor chain caused numerous and variable injuries to coral along its 65-meter track, including dislocating entire colonies and breaking others into pieces. To avoid further tissue loss and mortality, a stabilization or re-attachment restoration alternative was a preferred alternative. However, given the diversity, the rugosity, and the complex structural nature of the reef, there was a very high likelihood of secondary injuries associated with cementing colonies within the injury track. Therefore, the alternative chosen was to use coral fragments from the injury area to extend the reef area by creating new habitat in an adjacent hard-bottom area. Using a variety of techniques, this approach was aimed at recreating an approximation of the physical variability and rugosity, to the extent practicable, of the habitat and structure that was injured. Structure with vertical variability was created in as natural a looking fashion as feasible. This was accomplished using only products that would be available from a typical building supply store. This approach for restoration is fairly low technology, scalable, economical, and could be applied equally in developed or developing areas.

On or around January 12-14, 2016 the M/V Tatoosh, a Cayman Island Flagged 303 ft. pleasure craft, caused extensive injury to coral reef habitat in shallow water 13-17 m depth in the West Bay Coral Reef Replenishment Zone off Seven-Mile Beach, Grand Cayman. The injury was caused by the deployed anchor chain of the vessel coming into direct contact with the reef. The total estimated area of impact (injury to both reef structure and biotic components) from the anchor chain of the M/V Tatoosh is 1,156 m2. These impacts were caused by repeated contact of the anchor chain with the living reef and substrate. Level I injuries (highly impacted) were areas where the reef structure has been lost or severely diminished and where most biota was crushed, fractured, dislodged, or buried. Level II injuries included areas of reef where devastation was not complete and consisted of toppled, dislodged, fractured, and overturned colonies, minimal structural injury, and abundant striations and abrasions to reef building organisms and/or reef framework. More than 1,000 dislodged and fractured colonies were located and salvaged by divers in the days and weeks following the incident. With the help of volunteers these corals were cached in crates adjacent to the injury. In total, 1,290 corals were subsequently reattached to the injured reef during emergency restoration operations. During the baseline post-restoration construction surveys 75 experimental (relocated) corals and 75 control corals on an adjacent, uninjured reef-spur were tagged for follow-up, long-term efficacy monitoring of the restoration effort. The six-month monitoring event revealed that 96% of the experimental corals survived the incident and subsequent relocation and reattachment. These results were invariant with the control corals which showed a 97% survivorship during the same period. We just completed in 2018, the second year of follow-up monitoring. These results show that 89% of the transplanted corals are still alive compared to 93% of the controls. These high survivorship rates are directly related to the rapid injury response performed by both the trustee and responsible party in the wake of the incident.

Primary and secondary restoration actions applied on a damage coral reef by ship grounding at Tanchacte Reef in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Coral reefs damaged by ship grounding reduces the resilience of these ecosystems and their natural recovery can take several decades if direct, active and immediate response actions are not applied. In 2016 an area of approximately 300m2 in the Tanchacte reef (Arrecifes de Puerto Morelos National Park, northern part of Quintana Roo State, Mexico) was damaged by ship grounding.The National Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture of Mexico implemented primary restoration actions such as the rescue of still alive coral fragments of Acropora palmata, their selection by diameter (small < 10 cm, medium < 50 cm, large >50cm), the return to the original position of colonies of massive coral (Pseudodiploria and Orbicella genus) turned around by the impact, fixation in the reef matrix, keeping the branches on their original position, of large fragments of A. palmata, the small and medium fragments were sheltered in plastic crates and placed in weak tidal current sites for their later handling and finally the stabilization of rubble that represented a potential danger for contiguous colonies not damaged by the accident. The secondary actions included: cementing the massive coral colonies secured during the primary actions with the use of concrete and the surrounding rubble, sealing of tissue lesions with epoxy plasticine to avoid possible diseases, infection of parasites or colonization of algae in the exposed skeleton, building a welded mesh nursery in order to fix the small and medium fragments of A. palmata allowing the fragments to grow protected from the sediment. Two years after the incident the colonies from the nursery grew enough to be outplanted to the impacted site starting the recovery process of the lost structure. Monitoring the site will allow to evaluate the efficiency of these restoration techniques.

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. Unchecked, these damages can result in additional reef loss and instability. However, if dislodged fragments can be collected and stabilized shortly after physical impacts then the probability of survival increases substantially. Restoration efforts can be performed in situ where impacts occurred or at-risk corals can be transported to other sites to promote coral recovery on degraded reefs. Results will be presented 2 years after over 8,500 corals were transplanted from one damaged reef to multiple reef sites in Southwest Puerto Rico after Hurricane Matthew in 2016. These types of impacts create thousands of at-risk corals that can be used for restoration.

In 2017, two devastating hurricanes, Irma and Maria, impacted St. Thomas island, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the northeastern Caribbean. These hurricanes had enormous impacts on the two coral nurseries operating on the island as well as on outplanted coral communities. Overseen by UVI faculty, graduate students in the University of the Virgin Islands Master of Marine and Environmental Science (MMES) program had become the primary caretakers of the nurseries and had performed a scientific evaluation of outplanted coral communities nine months prior to the hurricane landings. Following the storms, graduate students also became the primary re-builders of the nursery and conducted a follow-up evaluation of the same outplanted coral communities. A summary of the impacts of the hurricane on the nurseries and outplant communities is presented, along with lessons-learned about small-island coral restoration operations in the face of changing reef environments and increasing storm frequency.

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 the Caribbean Acropora palmata and A.cervicornis have been shown to be especially susceptible to strong storms and experience severe fragmentation. Coral reef restoration, using both sexually and asexually produced corals, has undergone a dramatic increase in both the number of projects and the number of corals being propagated and outplanted in recent years. Presently, programs around the Caribbean outplant tens of thousands of coral colonies grown in in situ and ex situ nurseries on a yearly basis. Here, we document the impacts of three major storms, Hurricane Matthew (Sept 28-Oct 10, 2016; max sustained winds = 165 mph), Hurricane Irma (Aug 30-Sept 12, 2017; max sustained winds = 180 mph), Hurricane Maria (Sept 17-Sept 25, 2017); max sustained winds = 175 mph) on reef restoration programs found along the path of these destructive storms. The data evaluated include impacts on different coral species, nursery types, and outplanted corals. The impacts on outplanted coral were also compared to impacts on wild colonies found in the same habitats. The goal of this collaborative effort was not only to document impacts of the storms on restoration resources and corals, but also to highlight the lessons learned from these disturbances and suggest ways in which restoration programs prepare better and mitigate the impacts of storms in the future.