During the mass outplanting (aka "Coralmania 2019";  Bayahibe, Dominican Republic), more than 15 institutions from tourism, non-profit, scientific and government entities, volunteered to outplant 1,230 coral fragments that have been growing in in-situ nurseries in the Bayahibe area.  Photo credit: © Paul Selvaggio/The Nature Conservancy

RESTORATION OF THE MONTH: Coralmania 2019 (Bayahibe, Dominican Republic)

• The Dominican Foundation for Marine Studies (FUNDEMAR), The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Dominican Coral Network (RAD) joined efforts to bring more that 45 people from institutions from all over the Dominican Republic to participate in Bayahibe in an outplanting event of Acropora cervicornis to restore at least 1 km of coral tissue.

• This event engages the local community to promote collaboration, partnership and sector diversity in coral restoration activities in the Dominican Republic.

• FIND OUT MORE  

To have your organization or project highlighted as the CRC’s Restoration of the Month, email your pics and info to Coral.Restoration@noaa.gov.

Happy June Restoration Community!

It’s been a busy May- The CRC has finalized a new Governance Document to ensure that the Consortium is more inclusive, transparent, and diverse. Check out the new version! The CRC will now have an Executive Team (includes the Steering Committee), as well as Regional and Ad-Hoc Groups, in order to incorporate a wider geographic network and meet emerging needs for tools and technology. This new structure will allow for improved communication within the Leadership and among the CRC membership. The CRC has also updated its Code of Ethics. Upon joining the CRC, new members will be required to read and accept the Code of Ethics. Current CRC members are assumed to have accepted the updated Code of Ethics.

Thank you to those who have expressed interest in serving as the new Steering Committee members of the CRC! The Consortium’s Leadership Team has received your nominations for the new Steering Committee seats. The Steering Committee will be reviewing your applications this month, and applicants will be notified by the end of the month.

CRC Working Group Calls:

• Larval Working Group - Thursday, June 13th at 2pm (EDT). Register HERE. Join in for the pre-spawning season check in!

The CRC has completed its first-ever Learning Exchange!!! Support for this exchange was awarded to Tatiana Villalobos at Reef Futures 2018 for her workshop submission below.

FINDING STRENGTH IN THE OUTCAST:
CREATING A CORAL RESTORATION NETWORK FOR THE
EASTERN TROPICAL PACIFIC (ETP)

Costa Rica, April 23-25th, 2019

Raising Coral Costa Rica (RCCR) and Centro de Investigación en Ciencias del Mar y Limnología (CIMAR), Universidad de Costa Rica, led the first workshop to address coral restoration in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). The meeting was carried out from April 23-25th, 2019, in the UCRresearch station in Rincón de Osa (south Pacific coast of Costa Rica). The main goal of the meeting was to create a regional network between Latin American countries conducting or anticipating research on coral restoration in the ETP. The network included participants representing Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Find out more HERE!

• Farewell Meghan! The CRC would like to send a very fond farewell to one of its dedicated co-chairs, Meghan Balling, as she moves on to new adventures in Charleston, S.C.! Meghan has been an asset to the CRC helping the organization to grow by providing exceptional support to CRC members, partners, and the CRC leadership team. Best of luck and thank you to Meghan! 
• A new Coral Restoration Program Support Specialist has joined the CRC- Welcome Michelle Loewe! Michelle comes to us from the Waitt Foundation where she served as a consultant conducting environmental policy research and supporting strategic planning. Michelle holds a Master of Advanced Studies degree in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. 
• The CRC has a new Latin America Regional Group! The wider Caribbean region supports the most important coral reef systems across the Atlantic Ocean. However, the region has also been under increasing threats by a combination of human-driven sources of stress, including climate change, which warrants a need to support coral reef science across the region. The presence of a Latin America CRC Regional Group will provide an opportunity to enhance communication, cooperation, and collaboration among regional scientists and practitioners, as well as with colleagues from other regions across the globe. This group will also help close the language barrier between the global and regional scientific community, foster increased opportunities for collaboration with scientists abroad, and facilitate organizing regional training workshops, and other research-oriented initiatives.
• The CRC and partners are creating a (soon to be) publicly available Coral Restoration Image Website to share the variety of exciting work happening in the global coral restoration community! The pictures are arranged into categories (e.g. nurseries, outplanting, monitoring, etc.), geo-tagged, and keyworded to make it easy for users to search through specific techniques, locations, or even restoration program. If you would like to share some of your pictures, please upload them on the following GOOGLE DRIVE LINK by June 30, 2019. Watermarked pictures are encouraged. Please also include the name of the program and photographer, if possible. You can also email your photos to Margaux Hein at margaux.hein@jcu.edu.au for uploading. 
• Thank you to the Fundacion Grupo Puntacana for hosting an amazing and fun meeting of the Association of Marine Laboratories of the Caribbean (AMLC). Last week was their THIRTY NINTH meeting!!  There were two coral restoration sessions and Tali hosted a well-attended Restoration Lightning Talks round. It was fun - 12 people kept their talks to under 5 minutes. Incredible. There is so much amazing restoration work happening in the Dominican Republic - thank you to TNC, Iberostar, and especially Rita Peachey and Victor Galvan for a great week.

PARTNER ANNOUNCEMENTS

• The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel on coral interventions will release their final report on June 12. Register HERE to join the NASEM for a public event on the new report, "A Decision Framework for Interventions to Increase the Persistence and Resilience of Coral Reefs."

• Last year, Álvarez-Romero et al. published a review on marine conservation planning, which describes the development of a conservation planning database. to track the development, implementation, and impact of conservation planning around the world. James Cook University is collaborating with Imperial College London and UNEP’s World Conservation and Monitoring Centre to further develop and consolidate the database. Please help us inform our next steps by completing a short survey and share it widely!
• The Reef Resilience Network’s Restoration Online Mentored Course has just ended, but was a big success with more than 120 reef managers, practitioners, and students from 31 countries and territories participating! If you missed the course, you can now access a self-paced version in both English and Spanish. Enroll in the course here.
• Attention Artists! Glowing, Glowing, Gone has just launched a public awareness campaign and challenge to rally creatives, brands and governments behind coral conservation and climate action. Use glowing colors to create art and designs that will be used to inspire action and help save coral reefs.   

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (through contract with Cardinal Point Captains) is looking for a Research Operations Specialist (ROS) II. The ROS will support research and monitoring activities including data collection, processing, and analysis for project's in NOAA's Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Mote Marine Lab has scholarships available for college interns in Summerland Key, Florida.

• FREE tide & wave loggers to non-profit science/research group: The RBR SoloD|tide sensors can easily be programmed, downloaded, and the data visualized and output to a spreadsheet via both PC and Mac. The data files are simple comma-delimited text files that can be read in by MS Excel, etc. Contact Curt Storlazzi (crtf-steering@coral.aoml.noaa.gov) for more information.

UPCOMING MEETINGS:

2019

• Jun 4-6 (Washington, D.C.): Capitol Hill Oceans Week 2019.

• June 25-26 (Tumon, Guam): 5th Guam Coral Reef Symposium. Call for abstracts - deadline 29 May, 2019.

• June 24-28 (Victoria, B.C.) Marine Imaging Workshop.

• Jul 29-Aug 2 (Cartagena, Colombia): 7th International Symposium on Deep-Sea Corals.

• Sep 9-13 (Berlin, Germany): 5th Young Earth Scientists Network (YES) Congress 2019.  

• Sep 24-28 (Cape Town, South Africa): 8th World Conference on Ecological Restoration (SER).

• Sep 30 - Oct 3 (Berlin, Germany): Wildlife Research and Conservation 2019 (WRC2019) an exchange of ideas between wildlife scientists studying life-history and phenotypic plasticity, conservation genetics, assisted reproduction, ethics linked to management, and more. Organised by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria.

• Nov 3-7 (Alabama): 25th Biennial Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation Conference.

 2020

• Jul 5-10 (Bremen, Germany): 14th International Coral Reef Symposium.

• Aug 24-27 (Kiel, Germany): 6th International Marine Conservation Congress.

JUNE 2019 MEDIA ROUNDUP

Research:

• Beckwith ST, Byrne RH and Hallock P. (2019). Riverine Calcium End-Members Improve Coastal Saturation State Calculations and Reveal Regionally Variable Calcification Potential. Front. Mar. Sci. 6:169.  

• Cunning, Ross, et al (2019). Extensive coral mortality and critical habitat loss following dredging and their association with remotely-sensed sediment plumes. Marine Pollution Bulletin145, 185-199.

• Kitchen SA, Ratan A, Bedoya-Reina OC, Burhans R, Fogarty ND, Miller W, & Baums IB. (2019). Genomic Variants Among Threatened Acropora Corals. G3: GENES, GENOMES, GENETICS, Volume 9: 5, pp. 1633-1646.

• Mollica, N.R., Cohen, A.L., Alpert, A.E. et al. (2019).  Skeletal records of bleaching reveal different thermal thresholds of Pacific coral reef assemblages. Coral Reefs, May: pp. 1-15.

• S.E. Cannon, Donner, S.D., Fenner, D., Beger, M. (2019). The relationship between macroalgae taxa and human disturbance on central Pacific coral reefs. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 145, 161-173.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2019.05.024

• Vitelli F, Hyndes GA, Saunders BJ, Blake D, Newman SJ, Hobbs JPA (2019). Do ecological traits of low abundance and niche overlap promote hybridisation among coral-reef angelfishes? Coral Reefs 38:1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01816-6
   

• Weber, Laura, et al. (2019). The coral ecosphere: A unique coral reef habitat that fosters coral–microbial interactions. Limnology and Oceanography. https://doi.org/10.1002/lno.11190

News:

• Wadlow, K. (May 1). Experts: Coral disease could change reef ecosystem.

• Fears, D. (May 6). One million species face extinction, U.N. report says. And humans will suffer as a result.

• The Conversation (EcoWatch May 7). Coral Reefs Provide Flood Protection Worth $1.8 Billion Annually — Another Key Reason to Protect Them.

• Wilner, M. (May 15). In fight to shield coral reefs from warming oceans, U.S. and Australian experts join forces.

• Sakoot, Tanyaluk (May 15). Foreign divers volunteer for Maya Bay coral restoration project.

• Khan, J. (May 20). Coral bleaching event underway in French Polynesia despite no El Nino.

• UN Environment (May 21). Planting Fragments of Hope.

• Bryant, Amy (May 26). Coral Values: Behind the reef restoration projects at Maya Bay.

The mission of the CRC is to foster collaboration and technology transfer among coral restoration scientists, practitioners, and managers, and to facilitate a community of practice that will advance coral restoration to keep pace with rapidly changing ocean and environmental conditions.