Grant funding received supported the transition of Coral Nurture Program into Phase 4, which is focused on enhancing trait space of corals used in the Program, refining planting methods for diverse coral species and evaluating strategic coral selection to increase site resilience.
Coral Nurture Program received the 2023 Regional Award from the Society of Ecological restoration. CNP supported by Rolex’s Perpetual Planet initiative also began work to select and integrate heat tolerant individuals into the propagation practice.
Coral Nurture Program, supported by the donors and funders of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, took part in the first official international CoralPalooza(TM) event. With over 50 divers, across 9 tourism vessels at 13 sites conducting outplanting to evaluate the return-on-effort and cost effectiveness of different outplanting approaches (coordinated versus daily). As part of this event, CNP surpassed 100,000 corals planted on the Great Barrier Reef.
Expansion of CNP into the Whitsundays (Coral Nurture Program Whitsundays – CNPW) Reef Islands Initiative to evaluate how the approach pioneered in Cairns-Port Douglas translates to the more complex challenges of Whitsundays reef environments and diverse tourism operations. The goals of the expansion were to tailor workflows to the unique context of the Whitsundays to ensure return on investment for longer term and sustained activities and to provide new insight on local coral reef ecologies and coral diversity to inform reef management in the Whitsundays.
Expansion of the program to include additional partners to resolve the cost-effectiveness of high throughput out-planting across diverse GBR reef sites and tourism business operations, and identify the impacts of the efforts to both reef ecologies and tourism stakeholders. Goals of the expansion include resolving traits of stress-tolerance that can help inform coral selection for nursery propagation and out planting.
End of the proof-of-concept stage. All tourism company partners have established tailored nursery and outplanting plans based on the needs of their individual reef sites. Efforts continued to further expand outplanting capacity and research opportunities. Research funding secured to begin assessing natural heat tolerance of native coral populations for selective nursery propagation, thanks to grants from ROLEX and L’Oreal.
Expansion to multiple tourism partners and locations to determine how the approach (that was successfully implemented in the proof-of-concept phase) could be applied across different reef sites and integrated into diverse tourism operations. The goal was to provide standard operating and reporting procedures to achieve scalability via coordinated practices.
Proof-of-concept initiated with one partner at one reef site to test the effectiveness of a new outplanting method that had previously been designed by Wavelength Reef Cruises (Coralclip®) alongside propagation approaches. The funding enabled scientific testing to be undertaken of the deployment of 25 research nursery frames and outplanting across research areas. This was boosted by in-kind contributions from UTS and Wavelength Reef Cruises.
Research nursery established with a focus on optimising coral propagation for GBR sites, topographies and environments. Wavelength Reef Cruises in partnership with Prof Dave Suggett and Dr Emma Camp of University of Technology Sydney (UTS) established the first multi-species coral nursery on the GBR at two of Wavelength Reef Cruises sites at Opal Reef. This start-up and pilot stage was self-funded.
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