Managing risks when intervening to help coral reefs

A new tool to help scientists and reef managers consider the ecological risks of different coral reef interventions around the world has been developed by researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). The resulting database enables users to identify and explore the risks of a range of interventions from small-scale coral gardening to more advanced approaches like assisted evolution, where corals and their life-giving symbiont algae are made more heat tolerant by accelerating evolutionary processes.