Australian and Caribbean Scientists Build a Shared Toolbox to Scale Coral Restoration

SECORE International / Australian Institute of Marine Science

Somewhere in the warm, shallow waters off Bayahibe in the Dominican Republic, tiny concrete tabs sit on the seafloor, each carrying coral larvae that may one day grow into a functioning reef. These tabs are part of a two-part seeding device designed by Australia's Institute of Marine Science for the Great Barrier Reef. Now they are being tested 15,000 kilometers from home, in Caribbean waters, with Caribbean coral species, by a team that had never used them before last year.

That is the point. The Global Coral Tech Transfer Project, a partnership between SECORE International, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and the Dominican Republic-based marine conservation organization FUNDEMAR, exists to take coral restoration technologies that work in one ocean and make them work in another. The premise is straightforward: coral reefs everywhere are declining under the same pressures, and the tools to help them should not be trapped on a single continent.

From the Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean

Coral restoration through sexual reproduction, often called Coral Seeding, involves collecting coral spawn during natural spawning events, fertilizing the gametes, rearing the larvae, settling them on substrates, and then deploying those substrates onto degraded reefs. The approach promotes genetic diversity in ways that coral fragmentation, the more commonly known method of breaking and replanting coral pieces, cannot match.

AIMS spent more than five years developing scalable and cost-effective Coral Seeding methods through Australia's Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. SECORE, meanwhile, has been refining low-tech breeding and restoration approaches across the Caribbean since its founding. FUNDEMAR has built operational capacity on the ground in the Dominican Republic, running coral breeding programs with SECORE since 2019.

Each organization developed effective techniques, but largely in isolation. The Global Coral Tech Transfer Project is an attempt to merge these parallel efforts into a single, adaptable toolkit.

Two-part seeding devices and the ReefSeed system

Two technologies sit at the center of the transfer. The first is AIMS's two-part seeding device, an evolution of the original Seeding Units that SECORE invented more than a decade ago. The design separates the settlement component, where larvae attach, from the outplanting component, which gets deployed on the reef. Coral larvae settle on small concrete tabs, and three of these tabs fit into a triangular device that can be handled in bulk. The separation of steps allows for mass handling during outplanting, a critical bottleneck in scaling up restoration efforts.

The second technology is ReefSeed, a containerized system designed to maximize coral fertilization success and larvae production while reducing labor costs. In March 2026, AIMS and SECORE teams met with FUNDEMAR in Bayahibe to integrate components of the ReefSeed system into FUNDEMAR's new aquaculture facility. The teams will compare larvae production and efficiency using ReefSeed technologies against the more traditional fertilization and rearing methods already in use in the Caribbean.

Testing what actually transfers

Technology transfer between ecosystems is never as simple as shipping equipment. Coral species differ between the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean. Water chemistry, temperature regimes, spawning timing, and local disease pressures all vary. A device optimized for the Great Barrier Reef may need significant modification before it performs reliably in Dominican waters.

The project's first two years are dedicated to exactly this kind of testing: adapting tools, evaluating which ones deliver lasting results, and identifying what needs to change. In the third year, the plan is to implement the most successful technologies at multiple locations within SECORE's Caribbean training and capacity-building network.

"By adapting and testing methods under local conditions, we are reducing technical barriers, shortening learning curves, and strengthening regional capacity," said Rita Sellares, FUNDEMAR's Executive Director.

The collaboration model

What makes this project structurally interesting is not any single piece of hardware. It is the pairing of a government research institution (AIMS), a science-based nonprofit (SECORE), and a regional conservation organization (FUNDEMAR), each contributing different strengths. AIMS brings engineering resources and large-scale reef system experience. SECORE provides technology translation expertise and a training network spanning multiple Caribbean nations. FUNDEMAR offers local scientific capacity, field operations, and knowledge of Caribbean reef ecology.

The kick-off workshop in August 2025 brought all three partners together at FUNDEMAR's facilities in Bayahibe, where they worked through every step of the coral breeding process, from gamete collection to larval settlement, to begin identifying where Australian and Caribbean protocols could be merged.

What this cannot solve

Coral restoration, however sophisticated, operates against a backdrop of accelerating ocean warming. IPCC reports have made clear that even the most aggressive restoration efforts cannot compensate for continued rises in sea surface temperature, which trigger the mass bleaching events that are the primary driver of reef decline. Restoration at best buys time and preserves genetic diversity while the larger problem of carbon emissions remains unresolved.

The project's geographic scope is also limited. While the stated ambition is to eventually make the restoration toolbox available in other regions, the current work is confined to the Caribbean, and specifically to sites in the Dominican Republic. Whether these methods will transfer to the very different reef systems of Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific Islands remains an open question.

There is also the matter of scale. Even with improved efficiency, Coral Seeding remains labor-intensive and expensive relative to the vast areas of reef that need help. The project may produce better tools, but the gap between what can be restored and what is being lost continues to widen.

Still, the logic of the project is sound: if restoration technologies remain siloed by geography and institution, the field moves slower than it needs to. Combining what works in Australia with what works in the Caribbean is a practical step toward building the kind of shared infrastructure that reef restoration will require in the decades ahead.