Initiative to restore one million corals launches in the caribbean and florida keys
Initiative to restore one million corals launches in the caribbean and florida keys
Date:September 12, 2016 Source:Mote Marine Laboratory
Mote Marine Laboratory and The Nature Conservancy are partnering on a coral conservation initiative that will enable coral restoration at unprecedented scales throughout the Caribbean and the Florida Keys. The collaboration officially began Monday evening, Sept. 12, 2016, in Miami, with the signing of a one-year memorandum of understanding (MOU), enabling the first steps in a proposed 15-year initiative of joint coral reef restoration and conservation efforts.
The goals of the initiative are to restore more than one million corals across the region's reefs, share science-based coral restoration and conservation practices among U.S. and international Caribbean partners, and construct necessary facilities such as coral gene banks, which preserve genetically diverse coral tissue and help researchers find strains resilient to environmental change. The Sept. 12 MOU will officially launch one year of planning and preparation, which will include growing 50,000 coral fragments.
Coral reef systems help provide shoreline resiliency that protects coastal communities and create vibrant, healthy oceans for the people that depend on them. Ocean acidification, increasing ocean temperatures as a result of climate change, overfishing, unplanned coastal development and other associated stressors including waste water have damaged or decimated reefs around the world. Coral cover in Florida and the Caribbean has declined by 50 to 80 percent in some areas in just the last three decades.
"As global challenges to the long-term sustainability of coral reefs intensify, so must our efforts to understand and address them," said Dr. Michael P. Crosby, President & CEO of Mote. "The basic and transformative research that Mote conducts is vital, but we also have a responsibility to translate and transfer the findings of our science into positive ecological, societal and economic impacts. Proactively restoring reefs at a regionally strategic scale, combined with establishing a network of coral gene banks to safeguard essential biodiversity, is unprecedented and allows for all three benefits: helping replenish some of the ocean's most biodiverse ecosystems, educating and involving communities that are intimately linked to them, and preserving livelihoods -- the billions of dollars generated by reef-related economic activity."
More:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160912173953.htm
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