"Puerto Rico Arks: Safeguarding Coastal Resilience"

Puerto Rico's reefs buffer the island’s coastlines against hurricanes and sea-level rise. But major storms like Hurricane Maria have devastated shallow reefs, weakening their natural defense function.

• Environment: Hurricane and other storm events have caused massive structural reef and research loss, leading to shoreline erosion and degraded habitat for marine life.
• Application: Coral Reef Arks create midwater nurseries that bypass the sedimentation and heat stress of shallow reefbeds.
• Project goal: Enhance reef complexity, boost coral survival, and reestablish ecological resilience for both marine life and human communities.

In 2021, our team deployed two Coral Reef Arks off the coast of Puerto Rico. These floating midwater systems are engineered to resist wave damage and are designed to promote coral and microbial community recovery.

• Midwater deployment protects corals from smothering sediment.
• Modular 3D scaffolding mimics natural reef geometry.
• Wave-resilient design ensures performance during storms.

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Feature:

• Diagram of Ark unit structure + coastal proximity overlay.

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Puerto Rico’s Arks serve as testbeds to validate ecosystem recovery tools in post-storm contexts.

• Coral survival and attachment on Ark surfaces
• Microbial colonization via limestone ARMS plates
• Water column chemistry before and after deployment
• Grazer presence (fish, urchins) around structures
• Structural integrity under wave stress
• Habitat complexity and biodiversity observations