Reef restoration project enters next phase

The reef restoration and coastal erosion management project being conducted as a partnership between the University of Mauritius, the University of Western Australia and SunCare is moving into a new phase. For the past two years, the project has focused on understanding historical environmental and shoreline changes at the site, the drivers of those changes and making predictions about the future. This work has involved remote sensing, long-term monitoring, detail short-term field experiments, as well as numerical modelling.

While the first phase of the project sought to understand the context of the problem, trials to cultivate corals in the shallow lagoon as well as offshore using floating coral farms have also been taking place. Success in the cultivation trials has led to an expansion of the cultivation zones from three to nine locations. Despite the challenges faced by the pandemic, a skeleton team has maintained operations after the pandemic limited tourists to the nearby La Pirogue resort, who is collaborating on the project. La Pirogue is not only providing in-kind support to the project but has also established opportunities for resort guests to assist the project by helping to maintain the cultivation sites both onshore and offshore.

Over the next few months, the first batch of corals will be transitioned from the cultivation sites onto the reef. Where and how these corals are being transitioned is being informed from the knowledge gained of the site as well as through simulations of how reef enhancement may affect lagoon waves and currents. This will help the project to make informed decisions about where to place these corals so that the coral no only has the best chance of survival and reproduction, but can ultimately contribute to coastal erosion management through the attenuation of wave energy at critical locations in the future. This project demonstrates how collaboration between research, local industries and the Government, as well as close stakeholder participation, can enable the development of integrated methods to address complex reef degradation as well as coastal erosion challenges.

This project is funded by the Tertiary Education Commission and supported by SunCare.