[Coral-List] [EXTERNAL] Re: ICRS 2021 meeting session: Can Coral Reef Restoration Increase Coastal Protection?

Andrew Ross ross.andrew at mac.com
Fri Sep 11 19:12:04 UTC 2020


Greetings Doug, Curt, Steve & List,

Ten-percent survivorship at 5-yrs is not fundamentally bad, as each of those will be shown suitable to the location incl. temperature spikes (recently at 2~3yrs). Assuming you’ve used a good genetic mix, what persists at 5-yrs will likely be growing & maybe even spawning. 

Example: recently we set 300 nursery head-started mixed Acropora for an impact remediation in a touristy bay in the west of Jamaica. Mike Risk’s “septic tank on a karst outcrop” may apply in some seasons, so we did much swimming, pondering, scanning, planning & hedging of bets… and ear-drops, yes. Through an unknown patch mortality and a bleaching event we have 43 isolates/corals at 12-months on-bottom, and all are established, most vigorous & I can comfortably suggest an upward trajectory from here (barring predation, disease event, clumsiness, silliness, hurricane, heavy-bleach event etc.). Wasted money is a question of goal & time - the client satisfied Govt, the bay will have a patch of branching coral habitat with realistic fingers-crossed for a spawn in 3~5yrs + a source of temperature-durable material for future culture/work while our little firm enjoyed a complicated project to hone methods & inform future scopes & augment humilities. Yes, we did our hand-wringing re. the raw responsibility of this contract as well as reputation, thus bet-hedging including minimizing our collecting impacts. 

A couple of ideas: 
i) I can’t immediately/directly control the water-quality or temperature, but I can have a hand in genet/lineage choices, planting point, ecosystem/PA/seeding/grazing, quantity (predator overwhelm?), parent impact & initial health, hopefully including a budget for ongoing reef husbandry or facilitations to spawning. These sometimes bring community & political conversations re. water, CO2 or solid waste investments and/or policy, but there’s useful work in the meantime & waiting would amount to sitting on hands.
ii) We learn far more from failure than we do from success, and 
iii) failure -vs- success may be a matter of time: What’s the difference between a bad haircut and a good one? About two weeks.

Example #2+ would be staghorn planted in/around MoBay for grad-school, ’07’ish. One formal site saw ~90% mortality at 15-months & last year much of that rock was thicketed, as is another informal beach/reef with notably worse water & algae & sunscreen. In fairness, another ostensibly better spot of the same lineages now has ~5 struggling colonies - so much nuance, so many lessons. 

To Curt’s points, I’d expand that the trade btwn green/blue & grey infrastructure is cost -vs- time, as new coral takes a while for an outcome that doesn’t have 100yrs in modelling of intended outcomes with nifty computer graphics. This is a difficult sell, leaning heavily on secondary incentives such as your & MikeBeck's insurance industry work, plus aesthetics & recreation & green-branding, or opting for a grey-blue hybrid. I also agree with Doug that it’s likely rearranging deckchairs without tackling climate, even with bet-hedging & hands-in, but the option is to sit & watch (while protesting). Re competitive funding & focus: I’m not funded by the usual donor/CFP processes and don’t see direct competition with mitigation/activism but that some of my clients may have blood (oil) on their hands (wallets)… but karma-cleansing is maybe another topic.

Best regards & keep safe,


Andrew M. Ross, Ph.D. 
Seascape Caribbean
+1-876-363-8850


> On Sep 10, 2020, at 11:24 AM, Steve via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi Curt,
> 
> I have a few questions regarding your response to Doug’s post.
> 
> From what I can tell, most restoration/outplanting projects in existence have not waited for stressors to be mitigated before moving forward. (In fact, my concern is that many do not like to focus on addressing stressors at all).
> 
> You mention that in order for restorative efforts to have a good chance of success stressors need to be mitigated “unless coral breeding/engineering has made the corals more resilient to those stressors”.
> 
> This is exactly the problem as I see it - is the plan to continuously genetically design corals to withstand ever increasing stressors?
> 
> I ask this because to me the lack of emphasis on addressing stressors only serves to reinforce the idea that we can engineer our way out of this - and that message only serves to delay the mitigation of stressors that natural coral reefs need to survive and flourish.
> 
> It seems to me that restoration has all the momentum for funding at the moment. Wouldn’t it make more sense to allocate more of those funds towards mitigation until such a time that restoration and natural recovery have a more sustained opportunity to succeed?
> 
> Finally, I do mean to denigrate restoration efforts. Coral science is greatly enhanced by these projects, but in my humble opinion, some do a much better job than others. Those that do not (for whatever reason) emphasize causation are, in a sense, self-defeating and ultimately may even prove more harmful than beneficial to the end goal of saving coral reefs over the long run.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Steve Mussman
> 
> Sent from EarthLink Mobile mail
> 
> On 9/9/20, 10:27 PM, Storlazzi, Curt D via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>> wrote:
> 
> Doug,
> 
> I whole-heartedly agree! Don't put canaries back in the coal mine. Thus one needs to determine what caused the coral decline in the first place, then that(those) stressor(s) need to be mitigated before any restoration likely has a good chance of success, unless coral breeding/engineering has made the corals more resilient to those stressors.
> 
> My thought regarding coral reefs and coastal protection is four-fold:
> 
> First, healthy coral reefs with high coral cover and rugosity (as would occur due to restoration) result in less wave-driven runup and thus coastal flooding. See Quataert et al. (2015).
> 
> Second, green coastal defense infrastructure is much less expensive than gray coastal defense infrastructure. See Ferrario et al. (2014).
> 
> Third, green coastal defense infrastructure such as coral reefs, oyster reefs, marshes, mangroves, etc can theoretically grow (not degrade as gray infrastructure such as seawalls and breakwaters do) through time if in a good environment, as discussed above, and generally are a net contributor to ecosystem health (as compared to gray infrastructure, which generally is not). See Beck et al. (2018).
> 
> Fourth, the US spends on the order of a few $million/year on coral reef restoration, versus on the order of half a $billion/year on pre-disaster coastal mitigation funding and 10s of $billions on post-disaster coastal restoration funding after hurricanes, such as Irma and Maria in 2017. If just a few percent of those pre-disaster mitigation funds or post-disaster restoration funds could be used for coral reef restoration, that would be a huge influx of funding for restoration. And that's just public dollars - what about private sector insurers? If a hotel restores its reef just offshore (reducing its flooding risk), might it get a lower insurance rate?
> 
> Thus if you can show coral reefs provide coastal protection at a management-relevant scale and in rigorously enough manner (e.g., Storlazzi et al., 2019), you might be able to create new funding opportunities for coral reef restoration to help increase ecological function, that, in turn, helps provide all of the other ecosystem services that average folks (non-coral lovers such as ourselves) crave, such as fisheries, tourism, recreation, etc.
> 
> Again, it does hinge, as you note, on successfully outplanting corals (maybe genetically engineered or selectively bred to be more resilient). But it seems we can't scale up those engineering, breeding, and outplanting efforts (and likely mitigation of local stressors such as land-based pollution) without a lot more funds that it appears are currently available....so let's think about how we might create such funding opportunities.
> 
> But that's just one thought....
> 
> Stay safe and sane in these crazy times, amigo.
> 
> Curt
> 
> ------
> 
> Beck, MW, et al., 2018. "The global flood protection savings provided by coral reefs." Nature Communications 9:2186.
> 
> Ferrario, F, et al., 2014. ”The effectiveness of coral reefs for coastal hazard risk reduction and adaptation.” Nature Communications, 5:3794.
> 
> Quataert, E, et al., 2015. “The influence of coral reefs and climate change on wave-driven flooding of tropical coastlines.” Geophysical Research Letters, 42: 6407-6415.
> 
> Storlazzi, CD, et al. 2019. "Rigorously valuing the role of U.S. coral reefs in coastal hazard risk reduction." USGS Open-File Report 2019-1027, doi.org/10.3133/ofr20191027 <http://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20191027>.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 
> Curt D. Storlazzi, Ph.D.
> 
> U.S. Geological Survey
> 
> Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center
> 
> 2885 Mission Street
> 
> Santa Cruz, CA 95060
> 
> (831) 295-3429 cell during COVID-19
> 
> https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/curt-d-storlazzi <https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/curt-d-storlazzi>
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: Douglas Fenner
> 
> Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2020 3:03 PM
> 
> To: Storlazzi, Curt D
> 
> Cc: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <mailto:coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> 
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Coral-List] ICRS 2021 meeting session: Can Coral Reef Restoration Increase Coastal Protection?
> 
> This email has been received from outside of DOI - Use caution before clicking on links, opening attachments, or responding.
> 
> Wouldn't an important aspect be how long improvements in the amount of live coral last?? If people plant out 10,000 corals and feel good about themselves, but only 100 survive more than 5 years, was it worth it?? This is a question which it seems to me the huge number of enthusiastic coral restoration people are dodging, and I think it is a critical one. Bad water quality and mass coral bleaching can undo all these good efforts, and WILL, if we don't address them, and so far we're failing miserably at that. Isn't this fad just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic??? Cheers, Doug
> 
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 7:05 AM Storlazzi, Curt D via Coral-List > wrote:
> 
> Dear colleagues:
> 
> We would like to draw your attention to a meeting session to address:
> 
> Can Coral Reef Restoration Increase Coastal Protection?
> 
> at the 2021 International Coral Reef Symposium, which is being held 18-23 July 2021 in Bremen, Germany.
> 
> If your work is relevant to this session please submit an abstract to ICRS20-39 under Theme 13: Interventions and Restoration via the following link:
> 
> https://www.icrs2021.de/program/call-for-abstracts/
> 
> Session Description:
> 
> Coastal flooding and erosion affects thousands of vulnerable coastal communities and has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in damage during the past decade alone; these impacts are predicted to worsen with continued population growth and climate change. There is growing recognition of the role of coral reefs in coastal hazard risk reduction as they dissipate wave energy and produce and trap sediment on adjacent beaches and thus reduce flooding and erosion. Given these benefits, there is the potential to apply coral reef restoration not only to meet ecological recovery goals such as coral species and reef communities, but also to reduce coastal hazards and build coastal resilience to current and future storms. To meet and support these joint objectives, there must be rigorous, quantitative assessments of restoration performance, particularly for risk reduction benefits. This mini-symposium focuses on advancements in understanding the role of coral reefs in hazard risk reduct
> 
> ion, including but not limited to (i) quantifying the roles of coral spacing, morphology, and attachment strength in boundary-layer hydrodynamics; (ii) relating coral species morphology, structural complexity, or reef location to change in hydrodynamic roughness or induction of wave breaking for different environmental forcing conditions; (iii) design and siting of reef restoration to best reduce coastal flooding for different reef configurations; (iv) comparison of natural green and hybrid gray-green infrastructure in relation to ecological and hydrodynamic change; (v) incorporation of ecological connectivity into reef restoration site selection; and (vi) cost-benefit analyses of restoration for coastal hazard risk reduction. Summaries of current local or regional-scale studies, including modeling exercises are encouraged, especially if they evaluate social and economic impacts of different restoration options.
> 
> Please visit the conference website for more information:
> 
> https://www.icrs2021.de/program/session-program/#c245
> 
> Abstract submission closes 15 September 2020
> 
> For further information and all updates, please visit:
> 
> https://www.icrs2021.de
> 
> If you know of anyone who might be interested who might not receive this notice, please feel free to pass it along. We are very excited about this session and look forward to your participation. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We hope to see you in Bremen!
> 
> Organizers:
> 
> Curt Storlazzi - USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center
> 
> Shay Viehman - NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science
> 
> Mike Beck - UCSC Institute of Marine Sciences
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 
> Curt D. Storlazzi, Ph.D.
> 
> U.S. Geological Survey
> 
> Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center
> 
> 2885 Mission Street
> 
> Santa Cruz, CA 95060
> 
> (831) 295-3429 cell during COVID-19
> 
> https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/curt-d-storlazzi
> 
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