House Reef | Living Waters Diving Resort

 

This is the Living Waters Diving Resort Reef Restoration Strategic Plan.

Scope of Project | Areas fronting the resort with deep from 15 to 80 feet. 

Our vision was not only to expand the coral population in this area, but also to propagate and spread it to other regions.

Targets |  We have drawn the area as shown in the image. Our initial visit to the site shows a lust of sea grass on swallow areas and a handful of corals in some areas.

Action Plan
A description of a project's goals and objectives, sites selected for restoration, and the interventions and actions that will be undertaken to conduct restoration. 

Monitoring Plan
A description of monitoring activities for your restoration project. It includes information needs, indicators and methods, spatial scale and locations, time frame, and roles and responsibilities for collecting data. 

Operational Plan
A plan including information on funding requirements, human capacity, skills, and other non-financial resources required, risk assessments, estimate of project lifespan, and exit strategy. 

Work Plan
A short-term schedule for implementing any of the plans above. Work plans typically list tasks required, the party responsible for completing each task, and when and how tasks should be completed. 

Step-wise approach to restoration planning and design

 

Framework for restoration, adapted from Lirman and Schopmeyer (2016)

As part of our goal was to include stakeholders who rely on the services that the reef provides in addition to scientists and reef managers, particularly for goals that relate to ecosystem services. This also include students, the future generation that would benefit for the program.

A pilot or trial outplants will be placed at the proposed site one year prior to proposed outplanting so corals can experience seasonality at the site, which may not be observed during initial site assessments - before a full-fledged outplanting effort.

We have plan the exact outplant sites appropriate for the program. This will be based on both our goals and capacity of the program (i.e., personnel, funding, corals, distance to travel, etc.). In some cases, a program’s efforts will be focused on one site; we're planning to put an old motorcycle as artificial reef, to use it dive training site which will also provide as a tourist attraction, to augment for the program's limited resources. 

Conversely, we have a program with a goal of creating breeding populations of a species may want to spread outplants to many sites to increase the chances of successful reproduction to restore population connectivity. We plan to consider the anticipated monitoring and maintenance at the sites. 

We consider factors when we choose the restoration site which are broken into two steps and are based on spatial scale. The first step is a broad-scale evaluation of what habitat should be selected for restoration and includes identifying sites with appropriate depth, substrate type, water quality, species presence, accessibility, and human impacts. If data are available on factors such as sea-level rise, currents, sea temperature projections, and coastal development plans, these should be used to further help inform site selection .

The second site evaluation step should be focused on where within the sites restoration should be conducted. This step requires in situ surveys of reef health, predators, space competitors, sediment, and substrate availability — all of which help determine where corals should and should not be planted.