Coral restoration practitioners and environmental enthusiasts recently marked the fifth anniversary of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary’s landmark Mission: Iconic Reefs (M:IR) program, celebrating the innovative partnership model that has led to its success and calling for continued commitment to the reefs.
Launched in 2019, the program set an ambitious goal of rebuilding and strengthening seven iconic coral reef tracts within the Florida Keys. Their approach is novel: leveraging different coral restoration practitioners and the programs they’ve individually developed, together with research and agency coordination, to ensure synergy of all goals and objectives.
“Mission: Iconic Reefs is NOAA-led and partner-driven,” said Maddie Cholnoky, the M:IR implementation manager. Her job is to encourage partnerships with coral practitioners, and to work with them to assess where different outplants should happen in relation to other experiments and activities. “We look at the mission holistically to make sure each facet is successful. We look at everything — from people’s missions and goals to who’s doing what experiment to who focuses on what species — to best fit people’s work together, so they can all achieve their goals while contributing to the broader mission.”
David Burke, the acting sanctuary superintendent, added, “The Mission: Iconic Reefs program was set up … to be something that we helped to get started but that everybody was going to be a participant in.” The intention, he said, is for this to be a project that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
This partnership model allows individual practitioners to bring their own expertise and tools to the fight to save our reefs; the overarching framework facilitates diverse techniques to be used on the parts of the reef tract where they will be most effective.
“There’s all these organizations and businesses that inherently would be competitive by nature,” said Cholnoky. “Under this mission, they’ve collectively come together with the same goals, so people are sharing stories, they’re sharing data, they’re sharing ideas, and it strengthens restoration to make what’s happening here a model for the rest of the world. I think that makes it really special.”
This shift toward collaboration proved critical in 2023, during an unprecedented marine heat wave that killed off much of the coral in restoration nurseries and on reefs. Wild and restored colonies both suffered.
“The 2023 bleaching was the most severe in this region ever recorded in history,” said Katey Lesneski, the M:IR research and monitoring coordinator. “It led to a high percentage of mortality of elkhorn and staghorn coral, but in that time we also saw higher resilience in boulder, brain and massive corals.”
Those more resilient corals and the resilient genets of elkhorn and staghorn have now become the restoration focus of many groups, kickstarting a later phase of M:IR earlier than intended.
“Based on everything we’ve seen and learned, this is the right move,” Lesneski said.
The “silver lining” of the 2023 bleaching event has been the lessons implemented in its aftermath and the learned resilience of practitioners, multiple people said.
“It changed our approach to restoration and adaptive management,” Cholnoky said. “We saw people come together and be innovative in a way that had never happened before.”
NOAA hosted a special 5-year anniversary screening of a feature film on M:IR produced by the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. The event, hosted at the Eco-Discovery Center in Key West, brought the coral community together from across the Keys.
Lesneski introduced the film and summarized for the Weekly some of the other successes that M:IR is celebrating:
- Creation of 100 new jobs.
- New research initiatives.
- Better understanding of our reefs.
- Increased public engagement through the Iconic Reef Guardians stewardship program and the new Eco-Discovery Center.
- New partners: coral practitioners, research partners, state partners.
“Mission: Iconic Reefs is so incredible because it not only supports the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and ecosystems here, but also the local economy,” Lesneski said. “Restoring our reefs and creating all these jobs and pulling all these different funding sources in is a critical component of supporting the folks that live down here that really care about and rely on the reefs. … In order to keep obtaining those benefits, and for the people who live here to continue to benefit, we need to have our reefs healthy.”
iOriginally pitched as a 20-year endeavor costing nearly $100 million, M:IR is adapting in real time to the challenges that a changing planet and political ecosystem pose. What remains constant, practitioners said, is the passion everyone has for this work and their drive to learn more, do better and protect the place we all call home.
