{"id":94,"date":"2026-03-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/?p=94"},"modified":"2026-03-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T00:00:00","slug":"reef-recovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/?p=94","title":{"rendered":"What reef recovery actually looks like"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Coral gardening \u2014 growing fragments on nursery frames and transplanting them \u2014 is now offered as a guest activity at resorts from the Maldives to the Mesoamerican reef. The technique is real and the results are highly variable.<\/p>\n<p>The core issue is that transplanting works only where the underlying stressor has eased. Planting nursery coral into water that will bleach again next summer produces a photograph, not a reef.<\/p>\n<p>The projects with defensible outcomes share three features: they select for heat-tolerant genotypes rather than fast-growing ones, they monitor survival for years rather than months, and they publish those survival figures whether or not the numbers flatter them.<\/p>\n<div class=\"pullquote\">Fragments planted is an input. Three-year survival is a result. Ask for the second number.<\/div>\n<p>Ask an operator for their three-year survival rate. A good project will give you a percentage and a caveat. A weak one will tell you how many fragments were planted, which is an input, not a result.<\/p>\n<p>None of this means the activity is pointless. Reef tourism revenue funds a substantial share of marine protection in several countries, and guests who have spent an hour underwater with a project tend to become the constituency that argues for it later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Coral restoration has become a tourism product. Some of it is meaningful science and some of it is decoration. How to tell the difference before you book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,16],"tags":[24],"touriza_theme":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-wildlife","tag-indonesia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"touriza_theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.rodh-it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftouriza_theme&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}