The sea urchin Diadema antillarum has been cultivated at Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences HVHL in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands to help restore the coral reefs around Saba and St. Eustatius.

Diadema sea-urchins play a vital role in maintaining a balanced coral reef ecosystem by grazing away algae and creating bare substrate for coral recruitment. The RAAKPRO Diadema project aims to develop interventions to improve larval recruitment and juvenile survival to increase local Diadema populations. …

Coral reefs are of great importance for social, biological and economical purposes. However, due to global and local threats they are declining rapidly. One of the ways to sustain coral reefs is sexual coral propagation. While the sexual propagation of corals for reef rehabilitation has been successful …

The coral reef ecosystem provides important services such as tourism revenue, food, pharmaceutical products and coastal defence. Coral reefs are under a severe amount of threats such as pollution, overfishing and climate change. These threats result in a decrease of coral reefs and so a decrease in three- …

For multiple reasons, such as changing ocean temperatures, overfishing and unsustainable tourism coral reefs are declining worldwide. A negative feedback loop is created by the loss of three-dimensional structures that the coral reefs create. These three-dimensional structures provide shelters for grazing …

Coral reefs have been in decline over the past decades. This has greatly increased the need for restorative measures. The islands of Saba and St. Eustatius, two special Dutch municipalities in the Dutch Caribbean, are not exempt to this decline. The Saba Conservation Foundation and St. Eustatius National …

Coral reefs in the Caribbean have suffered massive losses of corals since the early 1980s due to a wide range of human impacts, such as explosive human populations growth, coastal pollution, global warming, overfishing, invasive species and diseases. The publication in the journal science in 2003 stated …

Coral reefs are one of the most important ecosystems in the world, in terms of both biological diversity and economy. These ecosystems are under a great amount of threats (e.g. climate change, pollution, coastal development and overfishing), which can lead to reef degradation and decrease of three-dimensional …

Corals harbor complex and diverse microbial communities that strongly impact host ftness and resistance to diseases, but these microbes themselves can be infuenced by stresses, like those caused by the presence of macroscopic symbionts. In addition to directly infuencing the host, symbionts may transmit …

The coral reefs around the world have been under very big pressure. In some places up to 95% coral coverage is already gone. For this big decrease there are many different causes, ranging from natural disasters to predation and sickness. Even humans have a big influence on the coral reefs. To protect …