When COVID-19 hit, the Roatán Marine Park lost 85% of its revenue. But through CORAL’s partnership, they were able to prioritize patrols and continue protecting their coral reefs. Like many businesses and organizations in Honduras’ Bay Islands, the Roatán Marine Park (RMP) is almost entirely reliant upon tourism—85% of its operating budget is tied to… Continue Reading →
New results from our pioneering research show that protecting reefs that thrive in warmer waters may be key to helping evolution rescue reefs from the effects of climate change. For the last several years, we’ve been leading research funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and other funders to understand how we can best… Continue Reading →
Our three community scientists in Honduras brought improved fishing practices to the Mesoamerican Reef by building important relationships with fishers. Paola Urrutia, Greissi Lizeth Villatoro, and Ana Bessy Valdez spend their days building relationships with fishers. As our community scientists in Honduras, they travel every morning to popular fisher landing points and meet with the… Continue Reading →
On Maui, we enabled 10-year-old Abby Rogers to grow 900 native plants in her backyard to help us prevent sediment from entering the ocean and smothering coral reefs. When COVID-19 hit, 10-year-old Abby Rogers was looking for a way to help protect the environment. As a newly certified SCUBA diver, the Maui resident could now… Continue Reading →
A radiation oncology nurse practitioner by day and an expert seamstress by night, Laura Waters has been working tirelessly since the start of COVID-19. As the pandemic spread earlier this year, Waters noticed the lack of masks that were available to the public and frontline workers. She worried about her friends, family, and coworkers not… Continue Reading →
As Executive Director of the Roatán Marine Park, Francis Lean can relate to her tourist clientele—she used to be one of them. Originally from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, Lean used to join the 1.6 million people who visited Roatán on vacation each year. Roatán is one of the three main islands that make up… Continue Reading →
It’s 5:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and Erica Perez leaves her house in Hilo to start the slow, dark, one-and-a-half hour drive to the South Kohala coast on the other side of Hawai‘i’s Big Island. She arrives at the first site at 7:00 a.m., where she meets long-time community volunteer Keith Neal. They put their… Continue Reading →
10-year-old Abby Rogers has converted her backyard into a native plant nursery to help save coral reefs. Rogers is a volunteer with the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL), helping to grow native plants that will be transplanted at their stream restoration site in Wahikuli. The native plants trap sediment that runs off the slope and into… Continue Reading →
It’s 6:45 a.m. when Paola Urrutia arrives at Tela Bay. She makes her way down to the water, finds the spot where the fishermen will disembark after their morning catch, and sits down to wait. On the northern Caribbean coast of Honduras, Tela Bay sits at the bottom of a gently sloping tropical forest, marked… Continue Reading →