Moving to Industrial-Scale Coral Habitat Restoration

EU-MERCES webinar series

By GRID-Arendal

February 10^th, 2020

This webinar series, focussed on marine ecosystem restoration, provides fresh perspectives on how we can benefit from better planning for a healthy marine environment.

GRID-Arendal and the Marine Ecosystem Service Partnership (MESP) are hosting a 5-part webinar series from MERCES (Marine Ecosystem Restoration in Changing European Seas). MERCES is a Horizon 2020 project for Blue Growth funded by the European Commission, focussed on the restoration of degraded marine habitats from the coast to the deep sea. This webinar series will be of interest to a wide variety of stakeholders from academia to businesses, economists and decision makers.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE FIFTH WEBINAR

The fifth webinar, "Moving to Industrial-Scale Coral Habitat Restoration," will take place on Friday, 6 March, 15:00-16:00 CET (Brussels time) and will focus on two important topics:

1) Recovery of reefs using industrial scale slick harvesting and release

Jesper Elzinga, Van Oord Dredging and Marine Contractors (Van Oord), The Netherlands

Coral reefs are degrading globally and optimising techniques for active rehabilitation are continuously being investigated. A potential solution for applying large-scale coral restoration could be achieved by harvesting portions of wild coral-spawn slicks from thriving reefs, culturing them into settlement competent larvae on board vessels, and transporting them to degraded reefs for release to initiate coral recovery with genetically diverse and healthy larvae.

Boulder coral on rod © FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute

2) Lessons learned from coral restoration in shallow and deep environments

Cristina Linares (University of Barcelona) and Joachim Garrabou (CSIC, Barcelona)

We will present in the webinar the main results on restoration actions targeting temperate habitat-forming corals from shallow, mesophotic and deep waters developed within the MERCES project. We will present restoration protocols, main constraints potential solutions and implementation strategies to advise key stakeholders on how to move from experimental to “industrial” scales.