Coral Reef Conservation Program

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Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) is a partnership inside NOAA that started in 2000. It brings together several NOAA teams to study and protect coral reefs, using research and data to help partners in reef restoration. The program was created under the Coral Reef Conservation Act of 2000 and a Presidential Executive Order. Jennifer Koss is the director, and the program is based in Silver Spring, Maryland.

What CRCP does
- Gathers and shares scientific information that coastal managers and decision-makers need to protect coral reefs in U.S. waters.
- Monitors threats like climate change, overfishing, and pollution, and tracks how these threats affect reefs.
- Uses about 1,600 reef sites each year for monitoring, and makes all data public in CoRIS, the Coral Reef Information System.
- Maps habitats, forecasts ocean conditions, and handles communications and data management.
- Funds partner projects such as university and nonprofit reef management and restoration efforts. The goal is to award at least $8 million in grants each year.

How funding works
- CRCP money comes from NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
- In some years, the program has supported large-scale reef projects across the United States (for example, over $26 million in 2018).

Who works with CRCP
- CRCP includes several NOAA offices: National Ocean Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service.
- It also partners with state and territorial governments, universities, and non-government and intergovernmental organizations.

The mission and four (five) areas of work
- Mission: Protect, conserve, and restore coral reefs by keeping them healthy and functioning well.
- Pillars of work (five main areas):
1) Resilience to climate change: use data and tools to help reefs recover from stress, with plans to have partners apply resilience data to climate projects.
2) Crisis response and communication: early warning plans for bleaching, disease, invasive species, and storms; clear information for policymakers.
3) Land-based pollution: reduce pollution from land through watershed management, pollution source studies, and practices like vegetated buffers and better wastewater treatment; a key effort is the Watershed Partnership Initiative with the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force.
4) Fisheries management and marine protected areas (MPAs): provide data for fisheries management under national laws, help partners manage reef fisheries, and support the use of MPAs to protect reefs.
5) Restoration: support reef restoration research, resilience work, and international partnerships; explore methods like coral genetics work, symbiotic relationships, and larval propagation.

National reef status reports and information access
- CRCP, with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Integration and Application Network, produces national reef status reports. These synthesize data on coral and algae, fish, climate, and human impacts to give overall reef condition scores.
- The reports help establish a baseline and track changes over time, and they’re part of a broader effort to communicate reef information clearly to communities and decision-makers.
- All collected data are available to the public in CoRIS, which also contains a Deep Sea Coral Data Portal.

Education, outreach, and examples
- CRCP works to raise public awareness and knowledge about sustainable reef management. It runs workshops and produces educational materials.
- In 2017, an educational video called “A Guide to Assessing Coral Reef Resilience for Decision Support” won first place at the 2018 CineFish film festival.
- The program funds a wide range of projects, from school science trips and reef mapping to restoration work and public education.

Examples of CRCP work
- After Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, CRCP and partners supported reef restoration and assessment in Florida and Puerto Rico. They studied the storms’ impacts and helped with recovery efforts. Some findings showed macroalgae overgrowth in stressed corals, informing management decisions.
- In Hawaii, CRCP funds projects like the Hawaii Coastal Uses Mapping Project, which uses participatory GIS to gather important social and spatial data for coastal reef management.
- In 2015, CRCP funded a study by Florida International University showing that grazing fish can help protect endangered reefs. The program also supports climate research and new management approaches.

CRCP works to make science useful for protecting U.S. coral reefs and to strengthen reef resilience for the future.