AOML capacity for coral propagation and technology development
Problems:NOAA does not have a dedicated facility for the settlement and grow out of ESA-listed corals, critical for restoration and restoration researchState-of-the-art stress-testing facilities at AOML lack a source of coral critical for research Coral p...
Characterizing the transcriptomic basis of disease resistance in two critically important Caribbean corals
Disease is still a primary threat to both natural recovery and the success of outplants and there is a dire need for both diagnostic and effective intervention tools to manage disease risk. Libro and Vollmer (2016) described a set of 35 differentially exp...
Support for implementation of socioeconomic monitoring in Community-based Subsistence Fishing Area sites and proposed sites
In 1994, the Hawaiian legislature passed legislation which allowed for designation of Community-Based Subsistence Fishing Areas (CBSFAs) where communities could work with Hawai‘i’s Division of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) to establish management meas...
Coral performance evaluation: assessing the strengths and weaknesses of coral genotypes used in reef restoration
Background:While the majority of large restoration practitioners track and genotype parent colonies, little is known concerning genotype-specific performance. Previous work has revealed wide intraspecific variation in the ability of corals to respond to s...
Operationalizing Coral Population Level Assessment to Guide Restoration Monitoring and Success
To have wild coral populations growing comfortably above rates of replacement is a core goal of coral management, conservation, and restoration. In fact this metric - coral population-level growth rate - makes a robust and early indicator of realized resi...
The US Virgin Islands Coral Reef Restoration Plan (2023) provides a benchmark of stated goals and targets to track coral restoration success at 6 sites on St. Croix (4 sites) and St. Thomas (2 sites). The restorations are and will be implemented by multip...
Performance-driven restoration and data coordination
Background and problem: Coral reef ecosystem health has declined worldwide due to numerous anthropogenic stressors. In the western Atlantic and US Caribbean, coral cover has dropped to levels that are unsustainable for reef habitat persistence, with ...
Management of key fish taxa to promote the resiliency of coral reefs stems from the assumption that enhancing the abundance of these fishes, such as algal-grazing parrotfishes and surgeonfishes, ultimately increases the ecosystem functions they provide th...
Reef fish calibration study to enable the use of long-term, fishery-independent data by fisheries and regional managers
Puerto Rico's coral reefs support multimillion dollar fishing and tourism industries (Ault et al. 2013). Fishes including hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus), snappers (e.g., Lutjanus, Ocyurus spp.), groupers (e.g., Epinephelus, Mycteroperca spp.), and parrotf...
Testing strategies to increase thermal tolerance of restored corals in Florida
In recent years, coral propagation and reef restoration have reached ecologically meaningful scales, with 10,000s of nursery-grown staghorn corals being outplanted onto Florida reefs annually. While these propagation and restoration successes have been co...
AOML capacity for coral propagation and technology development