Reef Exchanges

As a part of Bleaching Awareness Month, led by our partners with the Coral Reef Alliance and International Coral Reef Initiative, we check in with longtime friend of the Network, Dr. Steve Schill. Steve talks with Henry and Annick about the process of going from using a small drone affixed with a digital camera to survey reefs to operating a fixed-wing surveillance drone that can monitor hectares of reef area in a single day’s work. As the frequency and severity of coral bleaching events incr...

Description: In response to the excitement and interest across the Network in MERMAID after our webinar on the topic earlier in 2025, we invited Dr. Emily Darling, Director of Coral Reef Conservation and Co-Founder, MERMAID, back to the network to talk with us a little more about how she developed the MERMAID platform. Emily brings along Shinta Pardede, Marine Science Unit Manager with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Indonesia, who tells us more about her experience using MERMAID in the ...

In collaboration with The Nature Conservancy Northern Caribbean Program, the Reef Resilience Network created a process for updating MPA management plans to be Climate-Smart and led implementation of that process with the Bahamas National Trust (BNT). In this episode, we sit down with two BNT staff to learn about their experience. Ellsworth Weir, the Director of Parks, and Alyssa Bastion, a Parks Planner, provide their perspectives of working to prepare their parks for the impacts of cli...

Historically, funding for MPAs has often fallen short of what is needed to ensure effective management and successful outcomes. At the same time, governments around the world are increasing their commitments to create and expand protected areas, bringing further attention to the need to secure adequate funding and prevent MPAs from becoming “paper parks.” In this episode, Dr. Angelique Brathwaite (Angie) describes Blue Alliance’s innovative MPA financing model, which supports “reef-posi...

With the Convention on Biological Diversity’s ambitious 30x30 commitment—aiming to increase the coverage of "effectively conserved and managed" areas to 30%—there is renewed attention on the pivotal role marine managers can play in achieving this goal. In this episode, Lauren Wenzel, Director, National Marine Protected Areas Center, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, discusses whether there is a minimum level of effective management required for an MPA to count towards a coun...

As climate change threatens tropical coral reefs with warming waters, the search for areas where water temperature remains relatively cool during warming events has become a critical area of research. One avenue of research—known as the Deep Reef Refugia Hypothesis—is investigating whether mesophotic coral ecosystems can provide sanctuary for tropical corals facing warming sea surface temperatures. A key aspect of the Deep Reef Refugia Hypothesis is vertical connectivity—how larvae and geneti...

MPA Enforcement, better understood as Monitoring, Control, Surveillance, and Enforcement (MCS&E), can be critical to effective coral reef management efforts, and many members of the Reef Resilience Network have identified enforcement as an area where they need more training and support. To address these needs, the Network, in partnership with Blue Nature Alliance and in close collaboration with WildAid, is developing a suite of online resources (including this Reef Exchanges episode, a we...

In this episode, Henry Borrebach and Kristen Maize from the Reef Resilience Network are joined by Rob McDonald, Lead Scientist for Nature-based Solutions at The Nature Conservancy, to discuss Nature-based Solutions for managing wastewater pollution. Nature-based Solutions provide an alternative to traditional gray infrastructure by using natural processes to capture and treat contaminated water before discharging it into the ocean or waterways. Wastewater can have negative impacts on c...