In addition to creating artificial reefs, there have also been several efforts to restore the coral reefs in our region. The University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (UM - RSMAS) operates a research-oriented coral restoration program, which includes a citizen science restoration program, called Rescue a Reef (RAR). The program focuses on propagating sustainable coral stocks within underwater coral nurseries and transplanting them onto degraded reefs. The transplantation of the corals assists with the repopulation of certain coral species and recovery of habitat and ecological function. UM reef restoration scientists have been conducting coral propagation and reef restoration in Florida and the Caribbean for over 10 years, focusing on the propagation of threatened resilient corals such as Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata.

South Florida’s coast has been impacted by urbanization, with significant impacts derived from synergistic man-made stressors of habitat fragmentation, overfishing, and pollution. With the increasing carbon footprint in our region affecting our ecosystems, it is fundamental to integrate reef restoration into the design of coastal defenses and planning in urban areas. The costs associated with rebuilding coral reefs systems can be offset by the ecosystems services’ economic benefits, since healthy reefs can enhance fisheries, promote recreational diving and protect our shoreline from coastal hazards. UM reef restoration research demonstrated that restored reefs, unlike artificial structures, are self-building and self-repairing; which makes natural restoration solutions two to five times cheaper than using artificial structures.

Furthermore, UM has a multidisciplinary team of experts - UM’s Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge (ULINK) Coastal Resilience Team- developing strategies to mitigate the impacts of sea-level rise, increased flooding, storm surge and ocean waves. The City of Miami Beach has partnered with the ULINK team on a project to develop and test coastal resilience strategies that combine grey and green infrastructures to reduce the vulnerability of coastal communities to these impacts. The project will investigate the role of healthy coral reefs on wave attenuation and how they impact mitigation on coastal structures using a set of tank-based validation tests through the Surge-Structure-Atmosphere-Interaction (SUSTAIN) laboratory.

In addition, the project’s activities will focus on identifying the most vulnerable sections of the City of Miami Beach shoreline, while evaluating the risk to both people and property along these candidate shoreline sections and, developing and testing hybrid grey/green infrastructure options (such as artificial reefs) through laboratory and field tests. The Nature Conservancy is also a partner on this project and will provide physical modeling data to identify the shoreline sections of Miami Beach that are more susceptible to reef degradation and could benefit the most from reef restoration (based on bottom topography, beach elevation, hydrodynamics, wave regimes, and distance to the reefs). The ULINK team will then value and quantify the social and economic vulnerability of the urban sector delimited by these shoreline sections. Once the sections are determined, artificial reefs models populated with coral fragments of three to five different coral species will be deployed to test the performance of coral fragments mounted onto modules under natural conditions. Then, coral survivorship and growth will be monitored at these sites. The project will assist the city to identify places where nature-based solutions for coastal defense can be deployed cost-effectively.

Combining grey and green approaches is likely a more sustainable alternative rather than just using artificial reefs, provided the design and location of the projects are well chosen (one of the goals of the ULINK program). The innovative aspect of the ULINK activities is the specific deployment of these structures with coastal protection in mind and the first-ever actual measurements of reductions in wave energy as a result of deployment both with and without restored coral. There is significant interest from the insurance and re-insurance industries in incorporating these kinds of nature-based defenses into their models and calculations, and Miami Beach makes a great test case for how these new models might work. In addition, a communication and outreach strategy will also be developed to inform the stakeholders on the benefits of nature-based coastal defenses.