Survey of coral restoration projects finds Australia has work to do

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-05-04 04:00

Australia; International; QLD

Australian and German researchers have found a 'notable' lack of Australian coral restoration projects as part of a survey of projects around the world aimed at transplanting coral to help reefs. The study identified over 50 projects not included in the current scientific literature, mostly from the Caribbean and Indo Pacific regions. In a questionnaire over 2016 and 2017, the researchers found 80 per cent of these projects were predominantly aimed at restoring local habitats, and many faced problems with sustained funding. The study noted since Great Barrier Reef bleaching events around the time of the questionnaire, there has been an increased push in Australia for restoration efforts.

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conference: PLOS ONE

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: James Cook University, Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research, Germany

Funder: SCAF acknowledges funding from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF, grant number 01LN1303A); https://www.bmbf.de/en/index.html. MYH is an employee of Marine Ecosystem Restoration (MER) Research and Consulting. The funders provided support in the form of salaries for authors SCAF (BMBF) and MYH (MER), but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.

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