Coral Reef Restoration in the Florida Keys

We make our living from coral, so let’s be straight about the reef it came from. Florida’s Coral Reef is in the worst shape anyone alive has seen it, and the people trying to rebuild it are underfunded, understaffed, and mostly working out of small labs and dive shops a few miles from us. This article isn’t selling you anything. It’s here so you know what’s actually happening on the reef, and so you know exactly where to send money, time, or a day of your vacation if you want to help.

Where the reef actually stands

The decline didn’t start with any one event. Florida’s reefs have been losing ground since the 1970s to hurricanes, disease, water quality and heat. But two things in the last decade turned a slow decline into an emergency. Stony coral tissue loss disease. First reported off Miami-Dade in 2014, SCTLD has since spread the length of Florida’s Coral Reef and out into the wider Caribbean — Jamaica, Mexico, St. Maarten, the US Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic. More than half of Florida’s Coral Reef has been affected, over 96,000 acres. It hits more than 20 of Florida’s roughly 45 reef-building species, and for the worst-affected — brain corals, maze coral, pillar coral — close to 100% of adult colonies on an impacted reef die. Pillar coral is the clearest example of what that means. Between 2013 and 2020 the Florida population lost 94% of its tissue and 93% of its colonies, leaving the species functionally extinct in Florida waters — a handful of scattered survivors with essentially no chance of reproducing in the wild. The 2023 marine heatwave. In the summer of 2023 the Keys recorded the hottest ocean temperatures ever measured here, in the longest-lasting marine heat wave on record. Some restoration nurseries at Looe Key and Sombrero Reef reported 100% mortality — tissue damage showing the corals died outright from heat rather than declining slowly through bleaching. The follow-up assessment was brutal. Fewer than 22% of outplanted staghorn corals survived. Fewer than 5% of the elkhorn. A NOAA-led study published in Science confirmed that the heatwave triggered the functional extinction of both elkhorn and staghorn coral in Florida waters. At the peak of the rescue effort, roughly 150 unique elkhorn individuals and 300 staghorn remained alive on the entire reef — less than 1% of their former abundance. What that adds up to. Coral cover at the seven reefs NOAA has prioritized for restoration sits at about 2%. The stated goal is to get it back to 25%. Two percent. That’s the number worth sitting with.

Why this is worth funding

The obvious answer is that reefs are irreplaceable habitat. The practical answer, if you need one, is that Florida’s reef generates roughly $6.3 billion in local sales and supports around 71,000 jobs a year. Every dive shop, charter captain, hotel and restaurant in the Keys is downstream of a living reef. So are we. The less obvious answer is that restoration is at a genuine hinge point. The 2023 heatwave was a forced experiment, and it produced real information: branching corals like elkhorn and staghorn got destroyed, while many massive and boulder corals — brain corals, star corals — came through it. Restoration programs have since shifted toward those species and toward banking heat-tolerant genotypes. That pivot costs money. Land-based nursery space, tank systems, power, boat fuel, permits, and people. This is not a field where a breakthrough sits waiting on a shelf for lack of interest. It’s a field where the science is moving and the funding is the constraint.

Where to give, and what each one does

Plant A Million Corals Foundation — Summerland Key

A 501(c)(3) built on Dr. David Vaughan’s work with micro-fragmentation — the technique, discovered by accident when a coral specimen broke against a tank, that lets massive corals be grown at 25 to 40 times their natural rate. It’s the single most important development in coral restoration in decades, and it’s what makes rebuilding boulder and brain corals within a human lifetime plausible at all. Their land-based nursery at Summerland Farms is at 23801 Overseas Highway, about 25 miles up the road from Key West.

• Donate → plantamillioncorals.org/donation (tax-deductible)
• Visit → nursery tours are free for individuals, families, schools and groups, by appointment
• Learn → they run workshops and offer micro-fragmentation training, and they take volunteers

Mote Marine Laboratory — Summerland Key

Mote’s Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research & Restoration (IC2R3) is 24 miles from Key West at 24244 Overseas Highway. It’s a 19,000-square-foot, hurricane-resistant, LEED Gold facility holding more than 20,000 coral fragments, and it was built entirely with philanthropic money. Mote also runs nurseries in Islamorada and Key Largo and underwater nurseries stretching from Key West to Key Largo. Mote is one of the core partners in NOAA’s Mission: Iconic Reefs, the initiative working to restore nearly 3 million square feet of reef across seven sanctuary sites to self-sustaining levels by 2040.

• Donate and adopt a coral → mote.org
• Dive with them → Mote runs coral restoration dive programs where you spend the morning on the science and a dive briefing, then head out to do nursery maintenance or outplant nursery-grown corals onto the reef
• Visit → public tours of the Summerland Key lab run Tuesdays at 10 a.m.

I.CARE — Islamorada

Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education is the one to look at if you want to physically put coral on the reef yourself. Founded by dive operator Mike Goldberg and scientist Dr. Kylie Smith and run out of Bud N’ Mary’s Marina, I.CARE’s whole model is turning recreational divers into a restoration workforce. A restoration dive runs about $25 on top of the dive charter. You get a morning of training with I.CARE scientists and interns, then an afternoon two-tank dive transplanting coral fragments onto reefs like Alligator Reef, Cheeca Rocks and Davis Reef. Keys locals dive free. You can come back year after year and watch what you planted grow. If you don’t dive, they run land-based husbandry, education and outreach programs, and those need hands too.

• Donate and book → icareaboutcoral.org

Coral Morphologic & The ReefLine — Miami

Worth being clear on geography: these two are Miami, not the Keys. They’re on this list because the work is genuinely singular. Coral Morphologic is the marine biological art project founded in 2007 by Colin Foord and Jared McKay. Beyond the films and the underwater cinematography they’re known for, Foord maintains one of the largest arks of coral biodiversity in South Florida and has spent years documenting Miami’s urban corals — the colonies surviving in the Port of Miami under conditions that should have killed them, which turn out to be some of the most stress-resilient corals anyone has found. The ReefLine is the project that grew out of that work: a planned seven-mile underwater sculpture park and artificial reef off Miami Beach, with Foord as Director of Science. The first phase, Leandro Erlich’s Concrete Coral, went in during late 2025 — 22 full-size concrete cars arranged as an underwater traffic jam, seeded with roughly 2,200 native corals grown at the Miami Native Coral Lab. It’s funded partly by a $5 million Miami Beach bond, with a further $6 million being raised for phase one.

• The ReefLine → thereefline.org
• Coral Morphologic → search their site directly for current projects and support options

If you’re going to do one thing

Give money to whichever of these speaks to you — all of them convert dollars into coral on the reef more efficiently than you’d expect. But if you’re coming to the Keys anyway, book the dive. A restoration dive with I.CARE or Mote costs less than most guided dives and you come home having physically attached living coral to a reef. It’s the rare conservation option where the thing you did is measurable, findable, and still there next year. Bring your kids. Bring the friend who thinks reefs are already gone.

Why we care about this

We work the same water under a Florida aquaculture certificate, and what we collect and grow here goes out through local corals — a few hours from the water to our system, instead of a week routed through three export facilities.

We grow coral in Key West for a living, and every frag we grow out here is one that didn’t come off a wild reef. That’s a real contribution and we’re proud of it. But it isn’t restoration, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Restoration is what the people above do, and it needs funding that our end of the industry doesn’t provide. If you keep a reef tank, you already care about coral more than most people ever will. Point some of that at the reef itself.

Talk to us before you buy

We’re a working coral farm and saltwater shop in Key West — not a warehouse. If you’re not sure whether a piece suits your tank, ask first. We would rather talk you out of the wrong coral than replace it for you later.

• Book a live consultation → — 30 or 60 minutes with us, scheduled right here on the site. Bring photos of your tank.
• Visit the shop → — Mon & Fri 10:30–6:30, Sat 11–6, Sun 11–5. Tue–Thu closed to the public for fish collecting and aquarium maintenance. Come see the systems and pick your own piece.
• Send us a message → — if you would rather write it out.