Restoration Planning

Effective coral reef restoration requires strategic, well-designed planning to maximize project success. Before investing in restoration activities, managers should collaborate with local experts, stakeholders, and decision-makers to develop detailed restoration plans. This process helps determine how, when, and where coral reef restoration will occur, ensuring that new efforts enhance and complement existing coral reef conservation and management strategies rather than compete with them.

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A Manager’s Guide to Coral Reef Restoration Planning and Design supports the needs of reef managers seeking to begin restoration or assess their current restoration program. The Guide is aimed at reef managers and conservation practitioners, as well as others responsible for planning, carrying out, and evaluating restoration activities. Through a six-step, adaptive management planning process, the Guide helps managers gather relevant data, ask critical questions, engage relevant stakeholders, and have important conversations about restoration in their location. The six-step planning cycle presented in the Guide. Each step is described within a section of the Guide. The planning cycle is iterative, hence the circular nature of the process and double-sided arrows between the steps. The cycle includes multiple entry points that can be used depending on where Guide users are in the planning process in their area.

Best Practice Recommendations

In the face of rising climate threats, it is important to understand the role and limitations of restoration in supporting coral reef conservation efforts. Following recommendations from decades of work in terrestrial systems, scientists have developed specific guidelines for coral reef restoration.  

These guidelines include, for example, the Ten Golden Rules for Coral Reef Restoration ref which propose ecological and socio-economic considerations based on established principles of resilience, management, and local stewardship; and A Roadmap to Integrating Resilience Into the Practice of Coral Reef Restoration ref which provides recommendations that integrate resilience principles into various phases of a restoration project, including for project planning and design, coral selection, site selection, and broader ecosystem context.

Recommendations from: A Roadmap to Integrating Resilience into the Practice of Coral Reef Restoration. Source: Shaver et al. 2022

See the Introduction to Coral Reef Restoration Planning Online Course for step-by-step guidance on how to use the Manager’s Guide to Coral Reef Restoration and Design and the Coral Reef Restoration Online Course for more details on best-practice recommendations and project planning and design.