Back

Proactive Coral Reef Restoration Using Thermally Tolerant Corals in Hawaii

Hoopai-Sylva, H.; Caruso, C.; Miller, S.; Hancock, J. R.; Parry, M.; Hughes, K.; Drury, C.

2025-03-31 ecology
10.1101/2025.03.28.646055 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Effective conservation of degraded ecosystems requires mitigation of the original cause of decline, but this step can be difficult in the context of global climate change. On coral reefs, persistent environmental stress which causes coral bleaching may be addressed by using coral restoration stock which is naturally more resilient, often termed "proactive restoration" in terrestrial management. To explore the feasibility and consequences of this approach, we outplanted 391 colonies of 7 species of reef-building coral designated as thermally tolerant or thermally sensitive during stress testing and monitored them for 2 years using photogrammetry to evaluate tradeoffs and return-on-effort. We found no growth, complexity or effort tradeoffs when using thermally tolerant corals, but tolerant corals had lower survivorship during our monitoring period, driven primarily by one genus. These data illustrate nuanced tradeoffs and consequences to proactive reef restoration and suggest that the potential benefits of this approach may only be fully realized during future coral bleaching events.

Published in Conservation Letters (predicted rank #7) · training set

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.