>Two species in particular — the venerable elkhorn (Acropora palmata) and staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) varieties — felt the impact most acutely. Undisputed reef-building champions of the Caribbean for thousands of years, they had laid the foundations of the region's most vibrant ecosystems. Since the 1970s populations of elkhorn and staghorn have declined by an estimated 92-97 percent.
>Today, however, there's a new effort in the works to rebuild these desolated reefs from the ground up with the hope that once-prosperous underwater communities could soon recapture their former glory.
>For Kayla Ripple, CRF science program manager, that investment represents a major milestone for her organization and for the coral restoration field as a whole. "No one's ever done restoration on this scale before," Ripple said. "This is going to be the basis for our entire work for the next three years, and we're really excited about it."
>NOAA Coral Reef Restoration Program Manager Tom Moore, whose office supports restoration of damaged areas that "need a little extra boost," said the grant is the NOAA Restoration Center's largest in terms of number of corals on an individual award. "Every year we're upping the ante on what we've done in the past," Moore said. "And the reality is that we have to — we don't have any choice in the matter. In order to have restoration matter at an ecosystem level, we've got to continue to significantly increase the amount of restoration that's being done every year."
>Founded in 2007 by coral-restoration pioneer Ken Nedimyer, CRF is a nonprofit organization that works to restore and study coral reefs and educate the public about the importance of the oceans. CRF has developed ingenious tools and techniques to cultivate and plant threatened corals such as staghorn and elkhorn, collectively known as branching corals or Acroporids.
>One of CRF's biggest innovations has been the development of coral nurseries off the Florida coast, where CRF staff and volunteers nurture fragments of corals into specimens large enough to transfer onto a reef in need. These floating havens, six in total, will supply all 50,000 of the corals for the three-year project. Each nursery consists of a submerged forest of PVC pipe "trees" with perpendicular branches from which up to 100 pieces of coral are suspended by fishing line.
>The nursery corals are organized by species and by their genetic makeup, or genotype. Each PVC tree is also a family tree of sorts, hosting corals that are genetically identical to each other. To grow more of a particular individual, divers simply break off a small piece from the "parent coral" and hang it next to its siblings. Amazingly, some of the earliest parent corals, collected more than a decade ago as "fragments of opportunity" broken off from the reef by storms, are still going strong today. "A lot of the parent fragments have been in our nursery for 10 to 15 years now," Ripple said. "From the initial fragments collected, you can create thousands and thousands of corals. Instead of taking coral from one reef and putting it on another, the nursery can sustain your propagation in perpetuity."
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>By keeping meticulous records of where each genetic strain of coral is planted and monitoring how well they do over time, researchers will be able to look for links between a coral's genes and its ability to survive in a particular environment. "Once we can understand what's actually causing them to react differently, that has really broad implications for further restoration of coral reefs," Ripple said. "So we're hoping that this can be an example for other groups to follow."
>In fact, that's another key requirement of the grant. To qualify for NOAA funding, CRF had to create a data-sharing plan to ensure everyone has access to the data their team gathers during the project.
>"CRF is going well above and beyond here," Moore said. "They're actually setting up these experimental projects at all of these sites, and they're going to be sharing that information with the research community in a way that says, ‘Come in and run your own experiments here.' It's a great model, and I think we're going to get a lot out of it."
>Greg Torda,

>to the reef. As they continue to grow, the corals begin to fuse into one another,
>creating coral thickets that act as habitat for fish and invertebrates.
>Moore said that realization is reflected in the urgency of NOAA's restoration work. "We're really pushing our partners to make dramatic leaps forward," he said. "We've got to not just be putting 50,000 corals out a year; we've got to be putting a half-million corals out a year."
>Money for coral restoration is precious, Moore said, and finite — so planting 10 times more corals can't hinge on getting 10 times more funding. That's why the agency places such heavy emphasis on improving the per-dollar efficiency of restoration efforts, such as growing corals faster, planting them more efficiently and improving their survival rate.
>Ripple said CRF hopes the data it gleans will help pinpoint specific genetic traits that make corals hardier and more resilient in various conditions. So while the restoration may be limited to CRF's backyard, the ARC's Torda acknowledged that the treasure trove of information the project will amass could have value that reaches far beyond the Caribbean. "I think that's a pretty sweet dataset to tap into," he said. "It would be very valuable indeed."
>Corals may have something of a reputation for being fragile, but they are naturally resilient creatures. Subject them to any one source of stress — high temperatures, bad water quality, marauding crown-of-thorns starfish — and there's a good chance they will bounce back.

>to the reef using a two-part marine epoxy.
>Some of those stressors are fixable. Dieveney said the sanctuary has developed an elaborate network of marine zones within the wider sanctuary boundaries to help protect the Keys' coral reefs from accidental damage through popular activities like boating and fishing.
>The sanctuary also issued the permits for CRF's coral-restoration work and has spent decades seeking to educate the public and reduce threats such as land-based pollution on the region's corals. "The idea is that the local things we can control will help shore up the coral reef for the more global impacts that are harder to address at a local level," Dieveney said.
>She's referring to, of course, climate change and ocean acidification — two massive global problems that, left unchecked, will continue to wreak havoc on coral-reef ecosystems everywhere. And if that happens, Moore said, no amount of restoration will be enough. "Restoration is not the long-term solution here," Moore said. "Restoration is something that helps us buy time. We can't go out and destroy reefs because we know how to restore them. The most important thing we can do is conserve the ones we already have."
>Watch the video Coral Restoration Foundation: Planting Staghorn Coral.
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>© Alert Diver — Q1 Winter 2017