Restoration Work Group Research Programs

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Working Groups » Coral Reef Restoration and Remediation » Restoration Work Group Research Programs

International scholarship shores up coral reefs' future
18 July 2007: A new scholarship initiative at the University of Queensland's Australasian Centre of Excellence will help protect coral reefs around South-East Asia and the Pacific for future generations.
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Healthy reefs hit hardest by warmer temperatures
07 May 2007: CORAL disease outbreaks hit hardest in the healthiest sections of the Great Barrier Reef, where close living quarters among coral may make it easy for infection to spread, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have found.
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Coral reefs down, but not out
06 April 2007: THE findings for coral reefs in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report may be bleak, but Australian researchers argue adaptive management options for reefs at risk are still in sight.
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Order your copy of the Reef Restoration Guidelines
01 March 2007 - COASTAL and coral reef managers can now order a copy of the CRTR Program's Reef Restoration - Concepts and Guidelines: Making Sensible Management Choices in the Face of Uncertainty technical manual.
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Enhancing recovery by culture and transplantation of corals

In this program the Restoration and Remediation Working Group is focussing on asexual propagation of corals to assist restoration. The challenge of restoration using transplants is balancing the costs of nursery rearing and effective use of limited source material against the likelihood of survival of transplants.

This program is investigating the effect of the size and structure of coral fragments on subsequent growth and survival for a range of species. Low-cost approaches involving direct transplantation are being compared to more expensive approaches involving periods of in situ culture prior to transplantation to damaged reefs.

The research is taking place on a lagoon near the Bolinao Marine Laboratory in the Philippines which has suffered from both blast fishing and mass bleaching and subsequent mortality of coral since the 1998 El Nino warming. Recovery since then has been negligible and while blast fishing has ceased there is still heavy fishing pressure in the area.

Enhancing larval recruitment

In this program the Restoration and Remediation Working Group is looking at the sexual propagation of corals from the larval stage following spawning. This involves a higher level of technology and at present much higher costs but does offer the potential of rearing hundreds of thousands of sexual recruits for restoration.

Research is being carried out in Palau International Coral Reef Centre (PICRC) with additional work on coral reproduction at the Bolinao Marine Laboratory in the Philippines.

Long-term efficacy and cost-effectiveness of restoration interventions

The effectiveness of restoration interventions should be judged in terms of what these interventions achieve in comparison to what occurs in natural recovery over at least a five to ten year timescale. Because of the variation of the natural reef and other confounding factors, it is difficult to perform adequately controlled comparisons using patches of natural reef.

To address this problem, the Restoration and Remediation Working Group is using standardized artificial structures of sufficient scale and replication to allow long-term statistically rigorous comparisons between outcomes of natural processes and a range of interventions.

The experiments are being set up in Mexico, Bolinao and Palau so that comparisons can take place at sites with very different recovery potentials.

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