Coral restoration: beyond coral production and coral outplanting

Coral restoration has been targeted as one of the major priorities to cope with the rapid loss of shallow coral reefs in tropical oceans. For years coral restoration has focused on developing techniques and technologies aimed at rapid and cost-effective production of corals and ways to outplant to cover wide spatial scales. While this approach is valid, it does not only represent the scope of coral restoration research as other important aspects in this field have received less attention. For example, little attention has been paid into the experimental framework needed to show impact beyond the number of corals/recruits produced and or transplanted, growth rates and other indicators. Furthermore, we still struggle to show how these interventions improve ecosystem indicators of reef structure and function. Here we propose a series of indicators different to the traditional ones based on the use of pertinent comparisons in space and time and indexes of association that have been used by ecologists for decades. We propose this framework to facilitate the design of specific evaluation criteria for donors and other stakeholders that are in charge of evaluating restoration success.