Community-based, low-tech coral aquaculture approaches used in this study proved to be successful, reliable and highly cost-effective tools to conserve and restore threatened Staghorn coral populations with minimum intervention and maintenance, and generated multiple management-oriented lessons learned. The Community-Based Coral Aquaculture and Reef Rehabilitation Program has continued to be a successful model to empower wider Caribbean community stakeholders to implement basic coral reef conservation and coral transplanting methods. This could have major implications in helping base communities engage into conservation-oriented coral reef management activities, and to help communities adapt and manage climate change impacts on their “backyard” coral reef ecosystems. Hands-on, behavior-modifying, transformative education continued to be a crucial product of community integration and active participation, improving local stewardship, and fostering their successful integration into planning, decision-making processes, and in the implementation of local-based coral reef and fisheries conservation-oriented and restoration-oriented management. However,hydroponic dutch buckets rapid adaptive responses in low-tech coral farming and reef rehabilitation will become critical to keep up with climate change impacts in the near future.
Community-based efforts will continue to be fundamental to successfully foster there habilitation of reef ecosystem’s resilience, biodiversity, ecological functions, and its socio-economic,ecological and environmental benefits and services. Further, the integration of the academia, NGOs, fisher communities, base communities, private stakeholders and government institutions has become a successful collaborative model that can be applied through the wider Caribbean Region and will be important in a time of economic constraints across developing island nations.Nonetheless, there is a particular concern with the still prevailing lack of adaptation capacity of multiple coastal base communities to climate change impacts, including sea level rise and loss of coral reefs, across many small island nations through the wider Caribbean, which could affect the sustainability of coastal community livelihoods . Further, weak governance and lack of political will to enforce existing regulations can be a major deter rant of community compliance and a roadblock to project success. This points out at the importance of coral reef rehabilitation to foster increased coral reef ecosystem resilience, bato buckets functions, and services, further improving the adaptability of coastal communities and coral reef ecosystems to climate change.
A concerning call for precaution is also brought up by documented coral skeletal extension rates in this study, as well as in some recent studies of A. cervicornis farming , as it could be the result of successful methodologies being used, but may also imply significant combined impacts from increased LBSP and climate change which may significantly compromise coral colonies ability to withstand disturbance and may explain significant recurrent mortality episodes from multiple disturbance events.It is not clear whether we can foster acclimatization responses in coral reefs to futures characterized by recurrent ecological surprises, non-linear change and unexpected long-term consequences of climate change and ocean acidification. The speed at which climate change is impacting reef ecosystems leaves little opportunity for evolutionary processes to come to the aid of corals and other reef inhabitants, thus survival will be highly dependent upon any natural resistance already existing in the gene pools today . It will also rely upon successful governance, management of reef resources and land use patterns, and upon consistent enforcement of existing environmental regulations. Therefore, the identification of high-temperature resistant genetic clones has become a critical tool for successful coral propagation and reef restoration . On that line, we were successfully able to identify, propagate and restock local depleted populations using six different shallow-water genetic clones of A. cervicornis highly resistant to existing warm surface water conditions. But efforts should also be implemented to propagate deep water genetic clones across deep water habitats to improve ecological scales of connectivity across multiple spatial scales.