Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: ARMS to reefs: A new tool to restore coral reef biodiversity, fisheries yields, and human health in Madagascar

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

This project focuses on coral reefs – one of the most valuable ecosystems on the planet that are being lost at an alarming rate. This loss threatens human lives because coral reefs provide food, income, and shoreline protection. Efforts are underway worldwide to rehabilitate reefs, with mixed success.

This project uses a novel approach to rebuild coral reef ecosystems by building artificial reefs and seeding them with biota from healthy coral reefs. The project will be carried out in Ranobe Bay in southwest Madagascar which contains 32 kilometers of coastline with 13 villages, increasing populations, and growing rates of malnutrition largely caused by overfishing.

The primary goal is to rebuild healthy coral reef ecosystems and increase fisheries catch in Madagascar to reduce the incidence of malnutrition in the most impoverished country in the world. All aspects of the project will involve local scientists and fishers. The project will utilize cutting edge tools, including environmental DNA barcoding, fisher supported GPS tracking of fisheries activities, and extensive human health and well-being data collection to comprehensively connect ecosystem health to human health.

This project will provide a comprehensive blueprint for other coral reef restoration projects by thoroughly testing a new technology, creating tools to measure success, providing a guide describing the ecosystem to human health data collection protocols. Overall, this project will greatly enhance the equitable and sustainable use of marine resources and will respond to a threat caused by global change, all with a tool that can be applied anywhere coral reef ecosystems are found.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.