Coral restoration methods

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 18 related

1. Story
2. The family of interventions that put coral back on a reef, which fall into two groups with very different properties. Asexual propagation — coral gardening — takes fragments, grows them on in-water nurseries of frames, trees or ropes, and outplants them; it is fast, reliable and produces genetically identical stock, which means it does not add genetic diversity and can outplant a clone that will bleach at the same threshold as its parent. Sexual propagation collects gametes at the annual mass spawning, rears larvae, and settles them on the reef, which is slower and less reliable but produces new genotypes. Around both sit the assisted-evolution approaches: selective breeding for heat tolerance, inoculation with tolerant symbionts, microbiome manipulation, and cryopreservation of gametes as insurance. The honest framing is arithmetic. Restoration operates at the scale of hectares and hundreds of thousands of fragments; reef loss operates at the scale of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. Restoration is a way of holding genotypes, structures and local sites through a bad period. It is not a substitute for ending the thermal stress, and the summer of 2023 in Florida demonstrated why: outplanted coral dies in the same heat as wild coral.
3. Knowledge
4. Marine heatwave
5. Mass coral spawning
6. Coral restoration methods
7. Connections
8. Marine heatwave
9. Mass coral spawning
10. Extreme water temperatures in the Florida Keys kill nursery and wild coral
11. Reef-building corals (Scleractinia)
12. Coral bleaching
13. Thermal refugia
14. Coral restoration methods
15. Mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef during a La Nina
16. Extreme water temperatures in the Florida Keys kill nursery and wild coral
17. Coral restoration methods
18. Mass synchronous spawning described on the Great Barrier Reef
19. Evidence
20. Many scleractinian species on the Great Barrier Reef release gametes in synchrony over a few nights each year, a few nights after a full moon in late spring and early summer. V55 verification basis: not consulted; the paper and its finding are stated from the producing model's knowledge, and the number of species reported is deliberately not quoted.