The Coral Reef Conservation Program

An all-hands approach to conserving, protecting, and restoring coral reefs

By Craig Collins

It’s North America’s only barrier reef: Florida’s Coral Reef, about six miles off the coast. In waters from 15 to 30 feet deep, it traces the outline of south Florida in an arc from the St. Lucie Inlet in Martin County, through the Florida Keys to the Dry Tortugas, more than 60 miles past Key West. The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary comprises 255 continuous miles of this reef, and is the number one dive destination in the world, hosting millions of divers and snorkelers annually.

But the corals in the Keys are suffering. “If you’d been diving in the Florida Keys in the 1980s, and were to go back and dive there today,” said John Armor, director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, “you’d probably cry. Some parts of the Keys have been devastated by coral disease or ship groundings. But because we have a sanctuary there, we have an opportunity to turn that around. We’re working hard on a project we call Mission: Iconic Reefs.”

Two divers work together to replant staghorn coral to a reef.

Mission: Iconic Reefs is an effort to use everything NOAA and its partners know about coral restoration to outplant coral nurseries throughout the sanctuary’s 255 continuous miles. According to Jennifer Koss, who directs NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP), the historic restoration effort is “very much meant to be a public-private partnership initiative, with NOAA having created the blueprint of what is to happen, sketching out the number and diversity of species in each place, how they are to be planted, and how it’s phased out over a few years. It’s really meant to be a first pilot of largescale ecosystem restoration.”

Corals are marine invertebrates that live in symbiosis with a species of algae. The reefs, which form over time when their larvae attach to submerged rocks or other hard surfaces, are among the most beautiful ecosystems on earth. They are treasured for their rich color and unusual shapes. They’re also nurseries for incredibly valuable marine species and resources. The European Commission’s Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study estimated in 2009 that the world’s coral reefs have an average annual value – in food, raw materials, storm protection, waste treatment, recreation, and maintaining the genetic diversity of marine life – of $172 billion.

A reef off of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Like the Florida Keys, many coral reef ecosystems have been weakened or damaged over the past few decades by unsustainable fishing, climate change, pollution, and other stresses. The CRCP was created by Congress in 2000 to study and address these threats in collaboration with academic, state, territorial, federal, and international partners. The CRCP combines the expertise of several NOAA line offices. “We have incredible expertise in NOAA,” said Koss, “for both science and the development of management tools to aid our state and territorial partners.”

The first element of CRCP’s approach to conservation is to study and monitor corals: conducting observational surveys; collecting data at nearly 1,600 sites; and making that data available to partners through its Coral Reef Information System.

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The program also works directly to conserve coral reef ecosystems: first, by building the capacities of coastal managers to be stewards of their own corals; and second, by seeking to reduce, if not eliminate, the sources of local threats. “We focus a lot on landbased activities,” Koss said – such as agriculture, which can dump harmful runoff into shallow-water ecosystems. “We partnered with the USDA to work with coffee growers in Puerto Rico, for example, to transition from sungrown to shade-grown, which retains more soil and actually improves the quality of the coffee beans. That was one of our big successes.”

Restoration is the final key focus of the CRCP’s conservation strategy. Corals grow slowly and, Koss said, the reduction of local threats sometimes isn’t enough. “Some coral reefs have really been beaten up, past the point of natural recovery,” she said. “So we help coordinate targeted restoration interventions to put structure back out on the reefs, and corals back out on the reef. We think that’s a quicker way to get to coral recovery, which allows us to buy coral some time to adapt to the new norm of ocean conditions.”

Coral restoration is a relatively new field, and program partners are learning as they go, with input from scientists at NOAA’s Experimental Reef Laboratory in Miami, Florida, and other research institutions. Many of the slower-growing corals can be grown in these laboratories and then outplanted and tended by “gardeners” – which is part of the historic effort now under way in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

One of the things NOAA and its many partners hope to learn is how to rear and outplant corals in a way that increases the genetic diversity of species. Currently, the simplest way to propagate corals is to use fragments of existing corals – which Koss said is a risky strategy, because it assigns a single genotype the burden of propagating the entire species. A more genetically diverse ecosystem is likely to be much more resilient to ocean stressors. Fortunately there’s an international non-profit focused on solving this very problem: SECORE International, Inc. (SExual COral REstoration), which is developing methods of captive sexual reproduction to recreate reef

It will be a while before the results in the Florida Keys are known – but there are more people involved in this effort than ever before. “I think NOAA was very instrumental, in the early days, of understanding how to physically restore corals, and now that expertise is everywhere,” Koss said. “It’s state agencies. It’s nonprofits. It’s academia. It’s zoos and aquariums. Everybody is pulling their expertise together to make a difference.”