Most conversation about Caribbean coral is about loss, and there's good reason for that. But the Dominican Republic is also home to some of the most technically advanced coral restoration work happening anywhere in the region — a Bayahibe-based program that has broken records for coral seeding output, partnerships with international research institutions, and a set of nurseries in the Punta Cana area that have been growing threatened Acropora species for over a decade. This post covers who's doing the work, what techniques they use, what the results actually look like, and how a visitor can support it. It's the more hopeful half of a story whose first half we've covered extensively elsewhere.
Why Restoration Is Necessary Here
The short version: Caribbean reefs lost their two dominant reef-building corals within about a decade. Elkhorn and staghorn coral both collapsed from White Band Disease starting in the late 1970s, with staghorn losing roughly 97% of its cover regionally. Both are now listed as Critically Endangered. Since then, warming water, the 2023–2025 global bleaching event, and Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease have compounded the damage.
The reason this requires active intervention rather than just protection is population density. Broadcast-spawning corals need gametes from multiple colonies to meet in the water column to reproduce successfully. When a population drops below a certain density, surviving colonies are simply too far apart for fertilization to work, and the species stops reproducing even though individuals are still alive. At that point, leaving the reef alone is no longer sufficient. Someone has to intervene.
FUNDEMAR: Bayahibe
The Fundación Dominicana de Estudios Marinos — FUNDEMAR — is the Dominican Republic's leading marine conservation organisation, based in Bayahibe on the southeast coast and led by executive director Rita Sellares-Blasco. Its coral restoration program began in 2011 as a pilot: a single nursery with four structures holding around 30 fragments each. Notably, most of the initial staghorn fragments came from nurseries run by the Punta Cana ecological foundation, carrying genotypes collected from Punta Rusia, Samaná, Bávaro, Punta Cana, and La Caleta National Submarine Park — a genetically diverse founding stock drawn from across the country.
It expanded fast. By 2012 the main nursery had grown to 22 structures holding more than 600 fragments, using a mix of frame, dome, table, and rope designs, and that became the prototype for seven further nurseries and six outplanting sites. Published results from the program document 87% fragment survival over twelve months and mean growth of about 4 centimetres per year — competitive with the best-run restoration programs anywhere in the Caribbean. The most common cause of fragment mortality in the nurseries turned out to be predation by fireworms.
From Fragments to Coral Seeding
Fragment nurseries work well for branching species, but they have a fundamental limitation: every fragment is a clone of its parent. You can produce a lot of coral without producing any new genetic diversity, and genetic diversity is exactly what a population needs to adapt to warming water. The alternative is to work with sexual reproduction — capturing gametes during the annual spawning event, fertilising them, and rearing the resulting larvae. Every single offspring is genetically unique.
This is the technique known as coral seeding, developed by SECORE International, and it's where FUNDEMAR's work has become internationally significant. FUNDEMAR staff first trained with SECORE in 2017 at facilities in Mexico and Curaçao, and the two organisations built a formal partnership from 2019 onward. Over roughly five years the FUNDEMAR team succeeded in cultivating eight different coral species — including pillar coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus), which very few programs anywhere have managed to breed, and which is now listed as Endangered under the US Endangered Species Act after catastrophic SCTLD losses.
The scale-up has been real. In 2021 FUNDEMAR more than doubled its coral production. In 2023 it operated five floating nurseries — Coral Rearing In-situ Basins, or CRIBs — simultaneously at a single location, the first time that had been done anywhere in the Caribbean, producing what was reported as the largest coral seeding operation carried out to that point.
International Partnerships
FUNDEMAR now sits inside a network of international restoration research. Together with SECORE International and Reef Renewal Foundation Bonaire, it holds a three-year grant of US$1.38 million from CORDAP, a UN-linked funding platform created to accelerate coral reef research and development, aimed at advancing coral seeding technology and making the methodology transferable to other Caribbean islands.
A separate initiative, the Global Coral Tech Transfer Project, held its kick-off workshop at FUNDEMAR's Bayahibe facilities in August 2025, bringing in the Australian Institute of Marine Science alongside SECORE. As of March 2026, AIMS and SECORE teams were working with FUNDEMAR to integrate ReefSeed — a containerised system designed to maximise fertilisation success and larval production while reducing labour — into FUNDEMAR's new aquaculture facility. A Dominican organisation is now a testing ground for Australian reef technology, which is a reasonable indicator of where this program sits internationally.
Fundación Grupo Puntacana
Closer to us, the Fundación Grupo Puntacana — formerly the Fundación Ecológica Punta Cana, and still widely referred to as FEPC in the scientific literature — runs coral nursery work in the Punta Cana area under its PESCA program, alongside broader sustainability work at the Puntacana Center for Sustainability. Its coral focus has been on staghorn (Acropora cervicornis), with elkhorn work included.
The relationship between the two organisations is worth understanding, because it's more substantive than a logo on a partner page. The published record shows that the founding stock for FUNDEMAR's 2011 Bayahibe pilot came largely from FEPC nurseries. The Punta Cana operation was maintaining genetically diverse Acropora material before the Bayahibe program existed, and that material seeded the program that has since become one of the most productive in the Caribbean. The two have continued to exchange fragments and restoration technique training since.
The Part That Doesn't Get Written About: Fishermen
The most interesting thing about the Dominican model isn't the technology. It's who does the work. FUNDEMAR's restoration program was designed from the start around local community participation — fishermen, boat captains, park rangers, dive instructors, tourism operators, university students, and hotel owners, all trained and contributing time, boats, and equipment.
One story illustrates it. Alido Luis Báez was a young fisherman still in school in 2005 — he'd been fishing with his father since he was eight and on his own since fourteen — when he volunteered to help Rita Sellares with a project to stop illegal dolphin capture, because he knew where the dolphins were. He became a founding co-creator of the programs that followed, staying involved through periods when there was no funding to pay him. He is now central to the restoration work, alongside colleagues like Juan Roberto Adrien Prophete, another local fisherman who works as a reef restoration technician.
The economic structure matters too. The first hotel partner signed on in 2011, and formal agreements with most hotels and dive centres in the Bayahibe area followed, along with some government funding. Restoration in Bayahibe isn't a foreign NGO operating in isolation — it's embedded in the local tourism economy, run substantially by people from the fishing community, which is a large part of why it has survived fifteen years.
Honest Limits
Restoration is not a solution to reef decline, and the people running these programs are the first to say so. Nurseries are vulnerable to exactly the same stresses as wild reefs — bleaching events can wipe out years of work in a single hot summer, as happened at nurseries across the Caribbean in 2023. SCTLD continues to spread. And the scale mismatch is severe: restoration operates over hectares while reef loss operates over thousands of square kilometres.
What restoration realistically does is buy time and preserve options. It keeps genetic diversity alive that would otherwise be lost, maintains breeding populations above the density threshold where sexual reproduction fails, and develops the techniques that would be needed for larger-scale recovery if the underlying temperature problem is ever addressed. That is genuinely worth doing. It is not a substitute for addressing the cause.
How Visitors Can Actually Help
Both organisations accept donations, and for most visitors this is the highest-leverage option — restoration programs run on grants and partnerships, and unrestricted funding is genuinely useful. FUNDEMAR and Fundación Grupo Puntacana both publish current information on their sites about supporting their work.
If you're diving in Bayahibe, ask your dive centre whether they participate in the FUNDEMAR program — many in the area do, and some offer nursery dives or educational visits. The Puntacana Center for Sustainability similarly runs educational programming. Availability varies, so contact them ahead rather than turning up.
The least glamorous option is also the one that matters most on a day-to-day basis: dive well. Good buoyancy and no reef contact protect existing coral, including outplanted colonies that represent years of nursery work. Reef-safe sunscreen, no anchoring on coral, and not buying coral products all count. A restoration program can grow fragments for a decade; a careless week of diving on an outplant site undoes a meaningful part of that.
The Bottom Line
The Dominican Republic runs coral restoration that is technically serious by international standards. FUNDEMAR in Bayahibe has grown from a four-structure pilot in 2011 into a program with documented 87% fragment survival, eight species cultivated through assisted sexual reproduction including the extremely difficult pillar coral, a record-setting five-CRIB coral seeding operation in 2023, and active technology partnerships with SECORE, Reef Renewal Bonaire, and the Australian Institute of Marine Science backed by US$1.38 million in CORDAP funding. Fundación Grupo Puntacana runs nursery work under its PESCA program and supplied much of FUNDEMAR's founding genetic stock. Both are substantially staffed and supported by local fishing communities. None of it solves warming water, but it preserves genetic diversity and buys time. If you're diving with us and want to talk about reef conditions here or how to see restoration work during your trip, message us through our contact form with your dates.
