Florida’s Coral Restorers Are Preparing for Another Hot Summer
This week’s declaration of the second mass coral bleaching event of the past 10 years highlights the need for an all-hands-on-deck response.
A "coral tree" at one of the Coral Restoration Foundation's coral nurseries.
Photographer: Zach Ransom/Coral Restoration Foundation
When the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared a global coral bleaching event this week — one affecting reefs in every major ocean basin across 54 nations and territories — it marked only the fourth such bleaching event on record. But for Jessica Levy of Florida’s Coral Restoration Foundation, the announcement came as little surprise.
Levy is director of restoration strategy at the CRF, a Key Largo-based nonprofit that propagates coral in offshore “production nurseries.” After bleaching decimated coral reefs in the Florida Keys last year, CRF immediately started preparing for the next climate-driven catastrophe: gathering data, rebuilding coral stocks and developing structures to shade ocean nurseries where coral is raised for transplantation to reefs. The group’s strategies are just some of those being implemented all over the world in the hopes of giving the planet’s coral a fighting chance.