Reef Conservation Organizations
Coral reefs face stressors that no single actor can address alone. Climate science, hands-on restoration, water quality advocacy, fisheries management, and the political work of securing marine protected areas require different expertise and operate at different scales. This is a survey of the organisations doing that work, from global scientific bodies to community-scale NGOs operating on individual atolls.
Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS)
AIMS is Australia's tropical marine research agency and the source of the most comprehensive long-term dataset on Great Barrier Reef condition in existence. Its annual Long-Term Monitoring Program, running since 1986, surveys coral cover, reef fish populations, crown-of-thorns starfish densities, and bleaching extent across hundreds of sites. When the scientific community assesses the 2016, 2017, or 2024 bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, the primary field data come from AIMS researchers. The institute also leads work on coral assisted evolution — breeding heat-tolerant coral genotypes — and on integrating temperature monitoring with NOAA Coral Reef Watch's Degree Heating Weeks alert system.
Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), Florida
Founded in 2007, CRF operates the world's largest coral restoration programme in the Florida Reef Tract, the third-longest barrier reef system globally and a system that has lost roughly ninety-eight percent of its staghorn and elkhorn coral since the 1970s. CRF grows staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis and elkhorn coral Acropora palmata on underwater nursery trees — pipe frames from which coral fragments grow suspended in the water column — and then transplants outplanted fragments to degraded reef sections. The foundation has planted more than a hundred thousand corals to date and now trials multiple genotypes to identify individuals with above-average heat tolerance for use in future restoration.
Reef Check
Founded in 1996, Reef Check trains recreational divers and snorkellers to conduct standardised reef health surveys using a fixed protocol that generates data comparable across sites and years. Volunteers count indicator fish species — such as humphead wrasse Cheilinus undulatus and bumphead parrotfish Bolbometopon muricatum — and invertebrates including diadema sea urchins and giant clams, all of which serve as proxies for fishing pressure and reef health. The organisation now has trained surveyors in more than ninety countries and produces one of the few globally consistent long-term citizen science datasets on reef condition.
SECORE International
SECORE focuses on coral sexual reproduction as a restoration pathway. Wild corals release eggs and sperm in brief, lunar-timed spawning events. SECORE researchers collect gametes during these spawning events, facilitate fertilisation in controlled conditions, and raise the resulting larvae until they are large enough to be settled onto reef substrate using specially designed settlement devices. The advantage over the fragmentation approach used in tree nurseries is genetic diversity: sexually produced corals are not clones, and a diverse planted cohort is more resilient to disease and environmental variability than a population of genetically identical fragments.
Reef Resilience Network
The Reef Resilience Network, coordinated through The Nature Conservancy, is not a field programme but a practitioner learning platform. It hosts a library of management tools, training materials, and case studies for reef managers — particularly those running marine protected areas — covering topics from zoning design to bleaching response protocols. For a park manager in a Pacific island nation with limited resources and no access to a large research institution, the network provides a practical connection to global best practice.
CORDIO East Africa
The Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean (CORDIO) focuses on the Western Indian Ocean: Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Seychelles, and Comoros. It combines reef monitoring with research into communities whose food security and livelihoods depend directly on reef fish. CORDIO's work on co-management — governance arrangements that give coastal communities formal authority over reef areas — has influenced marine policy across the region.
WWF Coral Triangle Programme
The Coral Triangle — the marine area spanning Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste — contains more coral species and more reef fish species than any comparable area on earth. WWF operates a long-running programme in the region focused on expanding marine protected area coverage, reducing destructive fishing practices including blast fishing and cyanide fishing, and supporting sustainable small-scale fisheries. Its network spans government, community, and private sector partners across all six Coral Triangle countries.
Reef Renewal Foundation Bonaire
Reef Renewal Foundation Bonaire is an example of a place-based restoration NGO operating at the community scale. Bonaire's house reefs, which ring the island and are accessible from the shore, have experienced staghorn and elkhorn coral decline consistent with the wider Caribbean pattern. Reef Renewal trains local divers, hotel staff, and visitors in coral nursery work and outplanting, creating a volunteer pipeline that has planted tens of thousands of corals on Bonaire's fringing reefs. The model — tying a dive destination's tourism identity to active reef restoration — has been replicated in Curacao, Sint Maarten, and several other Caribbean islands.
Indo-Pacific MPA networks
Across the Indo-Pacific, networks of marine protected areas have been established with support from bilateral aid programmes, the Global Environment Facility, and international conservation organisations. The Micronesian Challenge committed Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands to protecting thirty percent of their near-shore marine resources. The Locally Managed Marine Area Network (LMMA) in the Pacific coordinates community-based no-take zones across Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea. These community-governed areas have in some cases produced measurable recoveries in target fish species within five to ten years of establishment.
What connects them
Different in scale and method, these organisations share two convictions: that reefs cannot be restored without the engagement of the communities living alongside them, and that local conservation gains — however significant — are conditional on the global emissions reductions needed to keep sea temperatures within a range corals can survive.
Explore reefs under protection
Many of the sites protected or actively restored by these organisations appear on the interactive map. Filter by marine protected area status to compare coverage across regions and identify reefs where conservation work is actively under way.