While the majority of the world’s reefs are now under threat or even damaged potentially beyond repair, a new study reported in the journal Current Biology on March 8 offers some encouraging news: efforts to restore coral reefs not only increase coral cover, but they can also bring back important ecosystem functions, and surprisingly fast.
“The speed of recovery that we saw was incredible,” she says. “We did not expect a full recovery of reef framework production after only four years.”
The work by Lange and her international colleagues represents the first reef carbonate budget trajectories at any coral restoration sites. The study was conducted at the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Program in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the largest restoration projects in the world.
The project relies on transplanting corals and adding substrate to restore reefs badly damaged by blast fishing 30 or 40 years ago. Without human intervention, those reefs had shown no signs of recovering due to the presence of loose coral rubble that prevents young coral larvae from surviving.
The restoration effort has added a continuous network of sand-coated steel structures to consolidate the rubble and offer a structure for transplanting coral fragments. The question was whether and how quickly such restored sites would recover. To find out, the researchers measured the carbonate budgets of 12 sites that had been restored at different times, up to four years ago.
2024-03-09 20:41:03
Article from phys.org