Reef Explorer Fiji Embark on a New Coral Resilience Project
Climate change is having a big impact on coral communities on Fijian reefs, so we at Reef Explorer Fiji along with the local community of Customary Fishing Rights Owners have been taking action to try and bolster the resilience of our local reefs with local management actions and ecologically relevant interventions. This week we expanded those efforts and began a Coral Resilience project with Diveaway Fiji!
Using simple coral gardening techniques, we have been propagating and growing new colonies of the most heat-tolerant lineages of corals which we use to create breeding populations. Nature is choosing the winners and we are helping them be more reproductively successful – a field-based assisted evolution approach.
Now, with the assistance of Diveaway Fiji and their conservation-minded guests, we are doing the same at their dive site Edge! Heat-tolerant corals grown in our adjacent heat-stressed shallow-water nursery site will be used to create breeding populations on the forereef dive site at ~14-16m depth. This effort is integrated into our research on thermal tolerance in corals as well as educational outreach efforts. We invite you all to come out for dive with Diveaway Fiji and help us to transplant some corals!
