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Restoration is increasingly seen as a necessary tool to reverse ecological decline across terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Considering the unprecedented loss of coral cover and associated reef ecosystem services, active coral restoration is gaining traction in local management strategies and has recently seen major increases in scale. However, the extent to which coral restoration may restore key reef functions is poorly understood. Carbonate budgets, defined as the balance between calcium carbonate production and erosion, influence a reef's ability to provide important geo-ecological functions including structural complexity, reef framework production, and vertical accretion. Here we present the first assessment of reef carbonate budget trajectories at restoration sites. The study was conducted at one of the world's largest coral restoration programs, which transplants healthy coral fragments onto hexagonal metal frames to consolidate degraded rubble fields. Within 4 years, fast coral growth supports a rapid recovery of coral cover (from 17% ± 2% to 56% ± 4%), substrate rugosity (from 1.3 ± 0.1 to 1.7 ± 0.1) and carbonate production (from 7.2 ± 1.6 to 20.7 ± 2.2 kg m yr ). Four years after coral transplantation, net carbonate budgets have tripled and are indistinguishable from healthy control sites (19.1 ± 3.1 and 18.7 ± 2.2 kg m yr , respectively). However, taxa-level contributions to carbonate production differ between restored and healthy reefs due to the preferential use of branching corals for transplantation. While longer observation times are necessary to observe any self-organization ability of restored reefs (natural recruitment, resilience to thermal stress), we demonstrate the potential of large-scale, well-managed coral restoration projects to recover important ecosystem functions within only 4 years.

Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for ecological assessments. However, high annotation and compute costs limit the field's efficacy. Generalizable pretrained networks can overcome these costs, but high-quality pretraining requires vast annotated libraries, limiting its current applicability primarily to bird taxa. Here, we identify the optimum pretraining strategy for a data-deficient domain using coral reef bioacoustics. We assemble ReefSet, a large annotated library of reef sounds, though modest compared to bird libraries at 2% of the sample count. Through testing few-shot transfer learning performance, we observe that pretraining on bird audio provides notably superior generalizability compared to pretraining on ReefSet or unrelated audio alone. However, our key findings show that cross-domain mixing which leverages bird, reef and unrelated audio during pretraining maximizes reef generalizability. SurfPerch, our pretrained network, provides a strong foundation for automated analysis of marine PAM data with minimal annotation and compute costs., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures

Experts release a roadmap for harnessing the potential of assisted evolution to help save corals. The IPCC predicts that if warming reaches 2°C, 99% of all coral reefs will be lost in less than 30 years. It is clear that to ensure the future of corals, the highest priority must be reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. However, even with swift and substantial reductions in emissions, corals will continue to face increasing temperatures for the foreseeable future, which can result in extensive coral mortality and local extinction of some coral species. While recent studies have shown that corals may exhibit some degree of adaptation to ocean warming, it is unclear whether corals are able to survive the rate of temperature change during heat waves that will become more frequent under several climate change scenarios. If corals lack what it takes to naturally rapidly adapt to new environmental regimes, they may fail to survive a warming ocean. This is where assisted evolution could be a game-changer. Growing our understanding of the power of adaptation In January 2023, we held a workshop on assisted evolution co-organized with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) as part of CORDAP’s Scoping Studies (a series of planning sessions and technology roadmap studies to shape our funding priorities). Our aim was to develop a visionary roadmap, offering recommendations on how to prioritise assisted evolution in R&D investment in the future. Assisted evolution is the use of human interventions to speed up the natural evolutionary process. It may allow coral species to adapt faster than they would if left unaided, allowing reefs and corals to keep better pace with the ocean’s environmental changes. The first step in creating this strategy was to pinpoint where we are now in our understanding regarding the potential and impacts of assisted evolution on enhancing coral tolerance to stress conditions like ocean warming. Our experts unanimously agreed that assisted e

Large transnational corporations (TNCs) could use their considerable finances, labor, manufacturing infrastructure, and logistics expertise to play key roles in upscaling ecosystem restoration efforts, which are vital for achieving global biodiversity, climate, and development targets (1, 2). Many TNCs are positioning themselves as environmental leaders, carrying out restoration that goes far beyond legal obligations to offset their own environmental impacts. This promise of corporate-led progress is alluring, and has delivered benefits in some cases, but is also fraught with risks. Well-intentioned efforts can do more harm than good (3), and some corporations oversell their efforts for reputational enhancement (greenwashing). Our evaluation of sustainability reports of 100 of the world’s largest businesses reveals the extent to which TNCs are claiming to contribute to—but failing to report on—ecosystem restoration. Increased rigor, consistency, transparency, and accountability are needed to ensure that corporate-led restoration delivers quantifiable, beneficial, and equitable outcomes.

Experts release a roadmap for harnessing the potential of assisted evolution to help save corals. The IPCC predicts that if warming reaches 2°C, 99% of all coral reefs will be lost in less than 30 years. It is clear that to ensure the future of corals, the highest priority must be reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. However, even with swift and substantial reductions in emissions, corals will continue to face increasing temperatures for the foreseeable future, which can result in extensive coral mortality and local extinction of some coral species. While recent studies have shown that corals may exhibit some degree of adaptation to ocean warming, it is unclear whether corals are able to survive the rate of temperature change during heat waves that will become more frequent under several climate change scenarios. If corals lack what it takes to naturally rapidly adapt to new environmental regimes, they may fail to survive a warming ocean. This is where assisted evolution could be a game-changer. Growing our understanding of the power of adaptation In January 2023, we held a workshop on assisted evolution co-organized with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) as part of CORDAP’s Scoping Studies (a series of planning sessions and technology roadmap studies to shape our funding priorities). Our aim was to develop a visionary roadmap, offering recommendations on how to prioritise assisted evolution in R&D investment in the future. Assisted evolution is the use of human interventions to speed up the natural evolutionary process. It may allow coral species to adapt faster than they would if left unaided, allowing reefs and corals to keep better pace with the ocean’s environmental changes. The first step in creating this strategy was to pinpoint where we are now in our understanding regarding the potential and impacts of assisted evolution on enhancing coral tolerance to stress conditions like ocean warming. Our experts unanimously agreed that assisted e

Experts release a roadmap for harnessing the potential of assisted evolution to help save corals. The IPCC predicts that if warming reaches 2°C, 99% of all coral reefs will be lost in less than 30 years. It is clear that to ensure the future of corals, the highest priority must be reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. However, even with swift and substantial reductions in emissions, corals will continue to face increasing temperatures for the foreseeable future, which can result in extensive coral mortality and local extinction of some coral species. While recent studies have shown that corals may exhibit some degree of adaptation to ocean warming, it is unclear whether corals are able to survive the rate of temperature change during heat waves that will become more frequent under several climate change scenarios. If corals lack what it takes to naturally rapidly adapt to new environmental regimes, they may fail to survive a warming ocean. This is where assisted evolution could be a game-changer. Growing our understanding of the power of adaptation In January 2023, we held a workshop on assisted evolution co-organized with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) as part of CORDAP’s Scoping Studies (a series of planning sessions and technology roadmap studies to shape our funding priorities). Our aim was to develop a visionary roadmap, offering recommendations on how to prioritise assisted evolution in R&D investment in the future. Assisted evolution is the use of human interventions to speed up the natural evolutionary process. It may allow coral species to adapt faster than they would if left unaided, allowing reefs and corals to keep better pace with the ocean’s environmental changes. The first step in creating this strategy was to pinpoint where we are now in our understanding regarding the potential and impacts of assisted evolution on enhancing coral tolerance to stress conditions like ocean warming. Our experts unanimously agreed that assisted e