Tag: Reef restoration

This is the largest gathering of coral reef scientists in the world, the Frankfurt Motor Show or the Paris Fashion Week for coral research. I just returned from attending my first International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), held from June 19-24, 2016, in Honolulu, Hawai’i. This is the largest gathering of coral reef scientists in the world, the Frankfurt Motor Show or the Paris Fashion Week for coral research. ICRS brought together about 2,500 coral reef scientists, policymakers, and managers from 70 different nations who presented their latest research findings, case histories, and management activities and discussed the application of scientific knowledge to achieving coral reef sustainability. I was asked to present my reef restoration work in Seychelles during my time as Scientific and Technical Officer for the USAID/UNDG-GEF/Nature Seychelles Reef Rescuers Project, the largest coral reef restoration project completed to date in the Indian Ocean. Within this project, we used “coral gardening” as an active conservation measure to support coral reef conservation in the no-take MPA Cousin Island Special Reserve, Republic of Seychelles. First, we harvested coral fragments from donor colonies or corals of opportunity (i.e. naturally detached fragments) in nearby areas and reared them in mid-water rope nurseries for about 1 year. Second, we transplanted the nursery-reared corals to a degraded reef site within the MPA. A total of 24,431 corals were transplanted to 0.52 ha of degraded reef site from December 2012 to April 2014, resulting in a 700% increase in coral cover by the end of the project. When we compared the fish and benthic community structures of a degraded control site and the transplanted site before-during-after transplantation, we observed a five-fold increase in fish species richness, a three-fold increase in fish density, and a two-fold increase in coral settlement and recruitment at the transplanted site. Our