PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Lillian J. Tuttle Raz
Co-INVESTIGATORS: Megan J. Donahue, Kim Falinski
Sea Grant Graduate Fellow:
Research Track: Island Resilience and Sustainability

Successful reef restoration requires detailed, site-specific information on the tolerances to prevailing environmental threats of local reef builders. Across Hawai‘i, and especially in southwest Maui, sedimentation is a major threat to coral-reef health, but proposed and ongoing watershed management projects lack specific limits for sediment pollution and measurable targets for eroded sediment reduction.

To address this need, the project team will work with local organizations and agencies to develop sediment stress thresholds for local reef-builders specific to species and places, that can serve as targets for erosion reduction efforts and be incorporated into recommendations to state agencies. These thresholds will help inform both water-based restoration (e.g. coral out-planting) and land management efforts at Olowalu Reef, a critically important site in the region that is poised to receive millions of dollars for restoration and infrastructure improvements in the coming decade. An important element of this project is the plan to produce, in concert with conservation practitioners, a map of the predicted success of coral restoration outplants across a sedimentation gradient at Olowalu, an approach that can be replicated in other locations where establishing water quality targets is a critical management need.