Frequency Ideally, monthly, (combined with nursery monitoring). At least the first six months. Special attention to spawning (if funded) and bleaching months (mandatory). Monitoring your out-planted corals How do we define success of restoration efforts? Survivorship: to track this, you must know how many corals you out-planted and where, and follow them over time. You may track survival by species, genet, site, age, out-plant method, etc. Growth: Once an acroporid is > 6 months, it is very difficult to measure their growth. If there was baseline PIT* data on your site, that may be useful but not completely accurate for growth.
Easiest would be to select representative individual corals for long-term growth rates measurements. See sidebar on photo-mosaics. Bleaching/Disease: We want to know which genets perform better over time (are more resilient or resistant to bleaching and/or disease events). You must keep track of which genets are out-planted, where, for this crucial data. Predation: It’s a snail-eat-coral (and fire worms!) world out there and although natural, can be unbalanced. For this reason we actively remove the coral eating snails and fire worms when encountered.
You will learn to identify coral predators, the safest way to remove them, and whether or not extra permits are required in your area for this activity. Biodiversity: Hundreds of fish and invertebrates are coral- associates. Baseline fish surveys on unrestored sites can be compared to restored sites. FoH is working on international collaboration for protocols to measure biodiversity of the smaller coral-associated invertebrates. Spawning: Natural sexual reproduction of out-planted corals is an end goal! However, spawning occurs at night, and during variable small windows around the full moons of July- September. This monitoring requires extra funds because of the complicated logistics.
FoH has documented all three nursery-grown acroporids spawning after five years on site. We have reason to believe they may spawn as early as two years after out-planting. Ask your instructor/trainer for more info. Materials Camera (software, laptop and especially external hard drive) Slates, pencils Extra cable ties Photo-Mosaics The use of photo-mosaics is a new method FoH uses to track percentage of coral cover increased over time. There are six plots in use at LBCNP for this method. The cameras are expensive, the protocol time consuming, and the analyses performed by the U of Miami who developed it come with a large service fee.
Separate funding would need to be sourced to implement this method at new sites. *PIT=point intercept transects used in AGRRA and MBRS surveys 15