Rehabilitasi Terumbu Karang Indonesia: Restorasi Terumbu Karang Pada Pusat Biodiversitas Laut Global

Indonesia is a nation that will be crucial to coral reef restoration efforts as the effects of human-induced climate change intensify. It has the most coral restoration projects running of any country worldwide and is situated at the heart of the world’s most biodiverse marine area in the Coral Triangle. At the same time, restoration efforts remain disparate and diverse in nature. The creation of a formal network of reef restoration practitioners to develop and implement a national restoration roadmap could be effective in consolidating and focusing reef restoration efforts. Such a network can help to build on past successes and extant networks, authorities, and programmes. This dissertation will not only explore the possibilities for the creation of a national reef restoration network in Indonesia, but also look at the potential to create transferrable actions for the wider Coral Triangle region. One major aspect of coral reef restoration globally is the use of fast-growing but vulnerable branching Acropora species transplanted or outplanted in degraded reef areas using techniques formulated under the concept of “coral gardening”, now more commonly referred to as active reef restoration. With the importance of branching Acropora in mind, the dissertation presents a major warning sign for the Indo-Pacific region: the suppressed recovery of branching Acropora in Indonesia’s Wakatobi Marine National Park (WMNP) following a mass bleaching event in 2010. It will go on to explore the varied survival rates exhibited by expansive and compact branching Acropora morphologies attached to sediment stabilisation structures on shifting rubble slopes in the WMNP. It will also look at the benefits of incorporating a modular mid-water floating nursery phase into restoration efforts, in order to create a closed nursery cycle that can function as a biomass production system. The findings of the dissertation suggest the need for greater quantification of Indonesian reef restoration efforts; the preservation and restoration of functionally important, structurally complex branching Acropora corals, which have been a historically dominant component of Indonesian reefs; and further investigation into the morphologies of branching Acropora being used in reef restoration, as well as the efficacy of outplanting fragments in single-species aggregations to mimic the historical presence of expansive single-species thickets on mid-depth reef slopes across Indonesia.