Goergen, et al., 2020

As coral restoration efforts continue to increase in size and number, there is an overwhelming need to define restoration success and determine progress towards successful restoration. Meaningful, consistent, comparable, and quantitative data is required to quantify the changes that result from restoration actions. However, there may be many definitions of success depending on the program or project goal(s). Restorations can have one or many goals that can be very different (e.g., ecological, educational), and therefore, goals cannot be
addressed in a “one size fits all” monitoring approach. The application of quantitative approaches to monitoring not only provides a reliable way to evaluate progress towards restoration success, but also provides means to identify problems and apply adaptive management efforts as needed.

The CRC established a priority for the Restoration Monitoring Working Group to develop guidance for monitoring coral reef restorations and to determine restoration success. This “Coral Reef Restoration Monitoring Guide: Best Practices for Monitoring Coral Restorations from Local to Ecosystem Scales” was developed for practitioners and programs in any stage of their practice: from starting up a new restoration effort, to scaling up current efforts, to improving efficiency. Coral restoration practitioners can use the hypotheses- and datadriven monitoring framework presented in this Guide to make confident comparisons between projects, programs, and regions, increase the efficiency of data collection, and make informed decisions about the data necessary to describe the success of the restoration goal or objective.