Collaborative pathways to confront the coral reef crisis

Coral reefs (figure 1) are threatened by climate change and other anthropogenic stressors and already are well advanced in a global trajectory of degradation (Tebbet et al. 2023). After decades of coral death and a degraded capacity for coral communities to recover, a tipping point has been reached in the scientific investigation of these changes. Convergence of effort within the international scientific community has the potential to crystallize recommendations that could lead to solutions to this ecological crisis, whereas divergence and introspection will leave coral reefs accelerating toward ecological extinction. The present state of coral reefs constitutes “the coral reef crisis” (Hughes et al. 2017), for which the best solution is a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2023). More tractable short-term solutions lie in collaborative leveraging of decades of investment and centuries of natural history and social science knowledge to generate accurate data. Decisions based on these data have the best potential to favor the resilience of coral reefs as well as the human communities they sustain. This potential will only be realized by redefining collaborations among international academics and communities to generate emergent knowledge to inform the development of applied solutions that are urgently required to save this vital socio-ecosystem. Outer reef (10–25 m depth) at Rangiroa atoll, French Polynesia, showing a diverse and healthy coral community dominated by corals in the genera Porites and Pocillopora. This photograph was taken in 2013 before the third global coral bleaching event affected the atoll in 2016. Photo: M.M. Nugues. Coral reefs are a globally distributed and interconnected ecosystem that transcends national borders, supports unrivalled biodiversity, and generates goods and services on which humans depend (Eddy et al. 2021). The ecological crisis for coral reefs is the emergent product of anthropogenic stressors and natural disturbances that are exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions of industrialized nations (Emslie et al. 2024). Some of the most serious consequences are felt by countries that rely on coral reefs for food security, cultural practices, economic development, and shoreline protection (Eddy et al. 2021), yet have low greenhouse gas emissions (Wolff et al. 2015). The emergence of the coral reef crisis in the 21st century (Hughes et al. 2017) exemplifies a major environmental problem for which collaborations are both necessary and well suited to leverage the benefits of different perspectives, diverse expertise, and contrasting knowledge systems (i.e., including local knowledge). By integrating information from all these sources, the search for solutions to the coral reef crisis will benefit from knowledge sourced from shared intellect, diverse opinion, and more rapid advances. Scientific understanding of coral reefs comes from a wide diversity of locations, but the Great Barrier Reef, Hawai’i, the Red Sea, French Polynesia, and parts of the Caribbean have been particularly influential foci of research (Souter et al. 2021). A history of long-term studies in these locations creates a fertile framework for addressing ecological and biological mechanisms underpinning the coral reef crisis, but the opportunity to harness such frameworks remains unrealized. We use this Viewpoint to forcefully advocate for collaboration as the means to realize the potential of existing (and future) data from coral reefs, and we describe (a) the value of international collaborative science in addressing the scientific needs that can support actions to mitigate the coral reef crisis, (b) the data products that are likely to be required for this outcome, and (c) the collaborative pathways to emergent knowledge that can be used to avoid an existential tragedy for coral reefs. We support our Viewpoint with first-hand knowledge from the coral reefs of French Polynesia, the scientific products of which provide a detailed analysis of decadal-scale coral reef change within a rich landscape of local knowledge and multinational institutional investigation. Although far from major urban centers, Mo’orea, French Polynesia, has been a focus of coral reef knowledge. Polynesian societies built a wealth of natural history knowledge over centuries about the marine environment on which they depended for food and transportation (Oliver 1974). Charles Darwin visited Tahiti, Mo’orea, and the Tuamotu atolls and made observations that crystallized his theory of atoll formation. Since 1971, scientists from France (e.g., Moritz et al. 2021) and the United States (e.g., Holbrook et al. 2018) have studied Mo’orea reefs in intense detail. Prior to Darwin, more than half a millennium of engagement by humans with the ocean leaves Mo’orea in an unrivalled position to leverage understanding of coral reefs and reveal potential pathways to solving the coral reef crisis. In an attempt to harness this opportunity, we highlight the importance of fully developed collaborations as the means to close the “collaboration gap” between what we know and what we could determine from existing and future knowledge (figure 2). Conceptual diagram illustrating the “collaboration gap” between realized (solid line) and potential scientific advancement (dashed line) that results from underutilized opportunities to collaborate. The collaboration gap expands with time as knowledge “complexity” (left–right shading gradient) extends from a local scale and single practitioners to collaborative teams and fully integrated international teams. Scientific collaboration occurs on a spectrum extending from the exchange of knowledge among a small number of skilled practitioners to complex interactions among multiple and diverse partners to realize transformative discoveries. Scientific advancement depends on collaborations that seamlessly extend from the production of data to the interpretation of results, and they greatly increase in efficiency, efficacy, and sustainability when built on a foundation of mutual respect, reciprocity, co-development of ideas, and trust. One-to-one relationships have been the basis of knowledge transfer among scientists for centuries, but advancements in technology have increased the speed and ease of communication among multiple participants, allowing collaborative relationships to expand to one-to-many. Despite the accelerated pace of modern science, enhanced outcomes of the information so generated do not automatically follow. The current degraded state of coral reefs, including in some locations around Mo’orea (Edmunds et al. 2025), emphasizes that the expansion of coral reef knowledge has yet to motivate and support the implementation of solutions to the environmental challenges faced by coral reefs. The coral reefs of Mo’orea provide an example of the challenges affecting coral reef ecosystems at a global scale that could be more effectively studied through the broad integration of local knowledge and scientific discoveries. We do not attempt to review the coral reef knowledge available from Mo’orea, or exhaustively review the work of the diverse communities who have been engaged in the study of coral reefs for centuries. Instead, we showcase select progress from a French (the Service National d’Observation CORAIL, hereafter “SNO CORAIL”) and a US research program (the Mo’orea Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research program, hereafter “MCR”) combined with local knowledge, to illustrate the importance of holistic approaches to solution-oriented science. The coral reefs of Mo’orea have been scientifically studied in multiple habitats (fringing, back, and fore reefs) in detail since 1971, with a bibliographic search for “coral” + “reef” + “Mo’orea” + “ecology” revealing 9700 results on Google Scholar and 298 results from Web of Science (both accessed 6 September 2025). Currently, SNO CORAIL and MCR maintain coral reef time series analyses around Mo’orea, the core of which entails monitoring of numerous sites every 1–2 years to generate thousands of high-resolution photoquadrats, hundreds of fish transects, and a detailed description of physical environmental conditions (seawater temperature, flow speed, wave height, etc.). Within a collaborative framework focusing on long-term changes on coral reefs, the collection of data by multiple participants can increase temporal resolution, enhance the spatial scale of coverage, and buffer against gaps in data collection caused by unforeseen circumstances. In Mo’orea, for example, gaps in international researchers’ sampling emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when it was challenging for scientists to travel abroad to collect data. Conversely, French scientists inhabiting the island were able to continue to collect data (figure 3). Collaboration among multiple participants creates emergent properties from collected data, yet the endeavor retains flexibility by allowing participants to add new measurements or modify the spatial and temporal scales of sampling. (A) Graphical representation of the potential of collaborations to accelerate the production of data for the coral reefs of Mo’orea. Stacked frequency plots show the production of core ecological data from 1980 to present that describe the reefs through research by scientists allied with SNO CORAIL (bottom) and MCR (top). With time, the accumulation of datasets and the number of study sites increase, showing the potential of collaboration to advance the production of data in pursuit of answers to critical questions and solutions to environmental crises. Diverse data sets provide insurance that buffers against the effects of unexpected events, enhances spatial scale of coverage, and provides increased temporal resolution. The dashed vertical line signifies the start of the COVID pandemic when travel restrictions were implemented. (B) Spatial representation of data collected by MCR (circles) and SNO CORAIL (squares) by grouped categories (colors) around Mo’orea. The points are slightly jittered to show the multiple datasets collected at each site. The base map of Mo’orea is provided by Google’s Open Street Maps. The benefits of collaborative frameworks extend beyond enhanced return from existing projects (closing the “collaboration gap” in figure 2) and include strengthening project design through early adoption of collaborative workflows. Local knowledge, for example, can beneficially inform site selection for coral reef ecological monitoring according to the project objectives, the timing and frequency of sampling to capture ecologically significant events (e.g., mating, spawning, seasonal blooms; Moritz et al. 2025), and the selection of diagnostic, indicator, or functionally important study organisms. Monitoring of marine communities in the Pacific Ocean, for example, has shown that the integration of local knowledge can accelerate the early stages of research. In the Solomon Islands, fishers were interviewed to determine the timing and location of fish spawning aggregations, allowing scientists to conduct surveys at critical points in time and space that otherwise would require years of exploratory effort to identify (Hamilton et al. 2012). Elsewhere, coral reef monitoring programs have benefitted from local knowledge that has identified “oasis” sites where coral reefs continue to thrive while reefs around them degrade. As the production of scientific data about coral reefs has accelerated (“realized advancement”), syntheses and emergent understanding follow (“potential advancement”), but usually with a substantial lag that represents a “collaboration gap” (figure 2). Moreover, although increasing effort is being allocated to preserve and manage existing data, datasets are not systematically being leveraged to their fullest potential, and swaths of data contained therein remain undiscoverable and hidden from the public domain. Hidden datasets include place-based knowledge that has emerged from generations of lived experience and provides expertise that enriches scientific discoveries to realize more broadly generalizable implications (Taylor et al. 2024). Collaboration is not just about creating a greater quantity of scientific data or emergent properties, but it also demands the inclusion of diverse participants and their epistemologies in data interpretation to co-produce knowledge (Strand 2024). By implementing complementary and reciprocal expertise in the science and natural history of coral reefs, interdisciplinary collaborations can result in enhanced understanding of complex ecosystems (Bodin 2017). Local knowledge, often rooted in traditional ecological knowledge, can serve as a directional line of study for the implementation of scientific discoveries in the development of locally relevant, place-based management plans (Quesnot et al. 2024). Research in Mo’orea has long benefitted from collaborative efforts, but recently, we were reminded of these benefits through our analyses of fringing reef communities from 2005 to 2025. Analyses based on MCR data alone revealed a lack of ecological resilience (Edmunds et al. 2025), but when these trends were interpreted in conjunction with analyses from adjacent sites by SNO CORAIL (Moritz et al. 2021), a nuanced outcome emerged in which ecological resilience was heterogeneous and differed between sites separated in depth by only ~3 m (Moritz et al. 2021, Edmunds et al. 2025). Missed opportunities for collaboration in coral reef science represent unrealized potential for advancement from existing investments (figure 2), and they delay the capacity of science to deliver timely information necessary to address environmental problems such as the coral reef crisis. History shows that without a rich landscape of scientific collaboration, many aspects of human endeavor would have suffered, leading perhaps to a delayed (or failed) ability to eradicate challenging diseases such as smallpox (Bhattacharya and Campani 2020 ). Enhancement of scientific collaboration requires political and institutional support, but effective collaboration in the modern era requires a change of scientific and professional cultures to recognize, nurture, and reward the advancement of inclusive and collaborative endeavors, and not just metrics. Collaborative networks must include multiple stakeholders reflecting the full array of knowledge extending from scientists to practitioners of local knowledge, and they must operate in a global arena of open access and discoverable data. Environmental crises are now arising at an ever-increasing pace (Biggs et al. 2011), and collaborative advancements are the only realistic means by which solutions to globally relevant problems will be found. Addressing the need to leverage advances in coral reef science through collaboration requires a strong and immediate commitment to (a) supporting international centers dedicated to synthesis and integration; (b) strengthening recognition and financial support to foster collaborations; and (c) prioritizing data interoperability, open access, and discoverability, and the development of federated scientific infrastructures. There is an immediate need to ensure the longevity of coral reefs along with the coastal communities they sustain over evolutionary time, and although this ultimately will require global attention to the factors driving contemporary environmental disturbances (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2023), the time lag between actions and outcomes creates the opportunity for short-term (years, decades) progress through strong scientific collaboration. This outcome can best be ensured by extending long-term (decades, centuries) monitoring and process-oriented investigations of coral reefs, and by effectively combining analyses of the rich datasets already available with diverse collaborative interpretations, including place-based knowledge systems. This work was funded through the International Colloquium Grant Program of the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, and the primary discussions took place at the Château de la Bretesche from 8 to 11 June 2025. We thank J. Beling and K. Beling for assistance in organizing our colloquium and for hosting us in France. With respect to the spelling of Mo’orea, we adhere to the official Fare Vāna’a transcription system (Academy of reo mā'ohi, Polynesian language spoken in the Society Islands) in the transcription of words and place names in reo mā'ohi. The authors declare they have no conlfict of interest in this contribution. This is CSUN contribution number 402, SOEST number 12073, and UCAO number 34. Data and code for figure 3 are available here https://github.com/njsilbiger/Collaborative_Science.