Testing what works, measuring what lasts, and building new habitat.
Best practices
Restoration guided by evidence
Part of Reef Response’s mission is to ensure best practices through
scientific research.
We are a university program, and the questions we answer feed straight back into the work:
which genotypes survive, which species help each other, how outplanted corals fare years later,
and whether engineered habitat can stand in for what has been lost.
Every outplant plot is tagged and revisited, so survival and growth can be tracked
over years rather than guessed at.
Monitoring
Measuring what works
Restoration only improves if someone counts the results. We monitor corals in
the nurseries and after they go back on the reef.
In the nursery
Fragments in both the in-water and land-based nurseries are tracked for growth, mortality,
disease, predation and bleaching, which tells us which species and genotypes are the
best growers and survivors.
After outplanting
Outplanted corals are surveyed regularly for growth, mortality and health, and that record
decides where and how we plant next.
The reef around them
We measure changes in coral cover and in fish communities, so success is judged by the reef
as a whole rather than by our corals alone.
Mesophotic outplanting
Is deeper water a refuge from bleaching?
In 2023, record heat set up a Caribbean-wide mass bleaching event. Ahead of the
peak, we moved staghorn coral off the nursery trees and planted it down a single reef slope,
to find out whether depth could keep it alive.
Staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) grows in shallow, bright water, which is
exactly where bleaching hits hardest. Deeper reefs are darker and, we suspected, less
punishing during a heat wave. So we took fragments from the shallow nursery and outplanted
replicate cohorts of the same genotypes along one continuous slope, at 20, 70, 100,
and 120 feet, keeping matching cohorts in the nursery at 15 feet. Depths
were chosen where wild staghorn already grows.
Temperature was much the same at every depth. Light was not. And the corals responded to the
difference: bleaching and death both fell as depth increased, and the deeper corals recovered
better. The same pattern showed up inside the nursery itself, where corals on the deeper
branches of the trees fared better than those near the surface.
Genotype mattered too. At least one genotype did better in the shallows, against the trend
— a reminder that a refuge for one coral is not a refuge for all of them, and a
practical argument for how we arrange genotypes in the nursery.
A tagged outplant at 120 feet during the 2023 bleaching event, with
bleached corals on the slope behind it.
120 ft
deepest outplanting on the slope
100
corals outplanted across five genotypes in 2023
2
back-to-back bleaching years tracked, 2023 and 2024
A second bleaching year
2024 brought bleaching again, back to back, and we scaled the experiment up to meet it:
twice as many genotypes, twice as many fragments per genotype at each depth, and molecular
sampling alongside the survey work: gene expression, dominant symbiont, and
bioassays. The advantage of depth showed up more clearly in that second year than in the
first.
Deep outplanting is not a way to rebuild a shallow reef. It is a way to keep genetics alive
through a heat wave that the shallows may not survive — a hedge, held in darker water,
against the years ahead.
Led by Sonora Meiling, with Jason
Quetel and Dr. Marilyn Brandt. Presented at Reef Futures.
Watch
The Deep Outplanting Project
A short documentary following the experiment, from the nursery trees to
120 feet.
Students
Graduate and intern research
Reef Response is a university program, and much of the science runs through
students: graduate researchers at UVI and interns spending a summer with us.
Their projects sit inside the restoration work rather than alongside it: the corals, the
nurseries and the artificial reef are all study systems, and what the students find feeds
back into how we restore.
Graduate research · Chloé Camacho
Biofilm on artificial substrate
Analyzing the role biofilm can play in the growth of stony corals on artificial reef
substrates — work that runs on
the artificial reef itself.
Graduate research · Nicholas Durgadeen
What makes a coral bleach
Investigating the ambient conditions that influence a coral’s susceptibility to
bleaching, so restoration can favour the corals and sites most likely to hold on.
Intern project, 2025 · Kadejsha Tonge
Heat-stress hardening
Testing whether corals grown on domes can be hardened against heat stress. Kadejsha ran
this as a summer intern and is now a graduate student, looking to carry the work
forward.
Completed · April 2025
Reefs reimagined
The first artificial reef in the U.S. Virgin Islands — built in the
shape of a Taíno petroglyph.
Artificial reefs can be an effective restoration tool, providing shoreline protection, fish
habitat, and controlled substrate for coral restoration research. To test artificial reefs as
alternative fisheries habitat for the USVI Department of Planning and Natural Resources
following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, we designed the territory’s first artificial reef
to incorporate Indigenous heritage.
Photogrammetric mosaic of the completed structure. The modules trace the
double-spiral motif at reef scale.
A Taíno cultural foundation
The U.S. Virgin Islands sit within a Caribbean island chain carrying deep Indigenous
heritage. Taíno peoples inhabited these islands for centuries, leaving artifacts and
petroglyphs, carved rock symbols, across St. John and the cays of
St. Thomas. These symbols persist as living cultural touchstones recognized widely
across the territory today.
Petroglyph symbols provided the design language for the reef structure. The
double-spiral motif is among the most recognizable, appearing across rock
faces and in artisan works throughout the territory.
The structure was built from marine-grade concrete modular units, arranged to replicate
that motif at reef scale. The modules incorporate surface texturing and void complexity to
maximize settlement substrate and fish community habitat.
187
concrete modules
23,500
pounds total
18×12
feet, and 2 ft tall
How we’re measuring it
Coral outplanting
Fragments were outplanted on both the artificial reef and the adjacent natural reef to
compare survival and growth. Periodic 3D photogrammetric models track colony change over
time without destructive sampling.
Fish communities
Stationary point count surveys run quarterly to measure fish abundance and size
distribution, assessing the artificial structure against sand and natural reef reference
sites.
Hydrodynamics
An Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler was deployed before installation and remains in
place, evaluating wave energy attenuation and flow modification attributable to the
structure’s footprint.
Loading the finished modules for transport.Each module weighs around 125 lb.
More to come
Other projects
Reef Response runs work that reaches beyond the nurseries — from habitat
engineering to disease response and community science.
Support the science
Monitoring surveys, photogrammetry and paid interns are all funded by donations.
