WORKSHOPS

The goal of the workshop is to provide participants with a hands-on learning opportunity and the knowledge to troubleshoot issues and bring back their experience to their respective programs and projects. This workshop will connect coral restoration practitioners with little or no experience with microfragmentation techniques and provide a general introduction to the tools and methodology. **This workshop is being offered 4 times. Register ONLY for 1 session**

The goal of the workshop is to provide participants with a hands-on learning opportunity and the knowledge to troubleshoot issues and bring back their experience to their respective programs and projects. This workshop will connect coral restoration practitioners with little or no experience with microfragmentation techniques and provide a general introduction to the tools and methodology. **This workshop is being offered 4 times. Register ONLY for 1 session**

Community-led reef restoration is rapidly expanding globally, yet the field remains fragmented through inter- and intra-regional disconnects between practitioners, researchers, and management. While existing syntheses on reef restoration approaches have focused largely on ecological methods and outcomes, there is comparatively limited understanding of the social, governance, and partnership models underpinning success. Participants will contribute to a live, collaborative map, identifying where they work, the types of restoration approaches used, and the governance models that shape their efforts. Exploring successes and failures the workshop will facilitate reciprocal knowledge exchange, highlight diverse reef restoration practitioners, and examine how partnerships can best enrich community-led outcomes, ultimately exploring how local lessons learnt can expedite broader problem-resolution by identifying wider relevance to external practitioner groups.

This interactive workshop is designed to equip coral reef restoration practitioners and managers with practical, science-based approaches to integrate climate change considerations – with a focus on thermal resilience - into coral reef restoration planning, implementation, monitoring, and adaptive management. As ocean temperatures rise and marine heatwaves and mass bleaching intensify, restoration projects must adapt to a hotter, more uncertain future. Participants will learn how to move thermal resilience from theory to actionable decisions using tools and frameworks to inform site and colony selection, nursery and propagation strategies, and monitoring design. The workshop will feature experienced facilitators, case-based group activities, and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange to ensure participants gain practical experience they can apply to their own work.

We invite coral breeding practitioners with experience in the design and implementation of ex situ and in situ nurseries for sexual coral recruit grow-out to participate in this workshop. Through roundtable discussions, we will address current limitations in nursery design and operation, with the goal of developing criteria for improved designs to scale up coral recruit production and improve post-outplanting survival and growth.

This interactive workshop aims to develop a scalable, global framework that bridges the gap between cutting-edge coral restoration science and environmental offset requirements. Collaborative sessions will explore how to translate biological gains into standardized conservation units and centralized, regional fund-pooling models. The session is designed to deliver a globally applicable blueprint featuring the functional metrics and open-source tools needed to consistently measure, compare, and scale reef recovery outcomes.

This three-hour workshop brings together Acropora palmata restoration practitioners and resource managers from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to continue developing a unified, science-based approach to cooperative population management. Adapting the framework of Florida Palmata Population Program (F3P) to the PR/USVI context, the workshop will cover best practices for safeguarding genetic diversity, review the current status of founder genets across land- and ocean-based nurseries, and tackle shared barriers to implementation. Through a facilitated small-group exercise, participants will identify priority actions and set realistic 2027 targets for ongoing regional work.

Successful, sustainable coral reef restoration that achieves ecologically significant scales depends on meaningful community integration. Although geographic and environmental variables dictate local approaches, restoration initiatives can maximize their impact by leveraging shared wisdom. This cross-basin, interactive workshop will guide participants through focused, small-group discussions using success stories to design intentional, goal-driven community engagement strategies. The workshop dives into:
- The “Why”: taking a step back to define the underlying purpose and goals of place-based community engagement
- The “How”: evaluating approaches and mechanisms to meaningfully integrate communities into restoration
Attendees will leave with an expanded network, ideas to strengthen local initiatives, and a renewed vision for community engagement in restoration.

This workshop introduces coral biobanking as a practical conservation tool that combines living biobanks and cryopreservation to protect coral genetic diversity. Participants will explore how to maintain corals on land for future reproduction, restoration, and population support, while also preserving genetic material for long-term security. The session is designed to make biobanking feel accessible and actionable by outlining the systems, planning, biosecurity, and partnerships needed to get started and keep going.