Coral Transplantation with ITDC in Coral Garden, The Nusa Dua

Nusa Dua – Indonesia Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) conducted a coral transplantation as an effort to support the conservation of coastal and marine ecosystems in Bali. Coral transplantation was carried out at The Nusa Dua beach on Friday (15/12), involving staffs and volunteers. A number of foreign tourists who participated in watching this activity on the beach gave appreciation.

The goal of coral transplantation are to transplant corals in the shallow waters of The Nusa Dua, restore damaged reef ecosystems, raise awareness among people about the importance of coral reefs, and as a part of the 44th ITDC Anniversary celebrations.
Various hard corals from genus acropora, montipora, porites, stylopora and favites have been transplanted on the spider’s web structure, using cables tie to fix on it. The corals transplant then placed at the Coral Garden, in the depth of 3 meters (highest tide) and 1.20 meters (low tide). Coral Garden location is about 150 meters from The St. Regis Bali Resort beach. It’s developed by Nusa Dua Reef Foundation in mid-2016 as an effort to recover dead corals post global coral bleaching event and to rehabilitate coral reefs ecosystems which destroyed by coral mining practices for building material in the past decades by local communities, long before The Nusa Dua resorts area was built. Coral mining was stop due to establishment of ITDC in 1973 and the construction of hotels began, but it has left massive damaged of coral reef ecosystems in lagoon areas until now.

The Nusa Dua coastal area is important habitat for coral reefs and seagrass beds. Both these ecosystems play important role, ecologically and economically. Coral reefs are habitat of marine life biota, source of food, coastal protection and big wave barrier, source of medicine, industrial raw material and jewelry, as well as tourism object. This coral transplant effort is expected to restore some damaged coral reef ecosystem and is expected to become a new tourism object within the Nusa Dua area.

Coral transplantation is collaboration Nusa Dua Reef Foundation with ITDC and Mars Sustainable Solution (part of Mars Syimbioscience).