As posted in Coral-List on March 11, 2010 (http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/2010-March/039880.html):
The Nature Conservancy, in partnership with NOAA and with support from MacArthur Foundation, is offering a new virtual training program on Reef Resilience to provide coral reef managers, trainers, and policymakers guidance on building resilience to climate change into the design of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and daily management activities.
The course incorporates the new science, lessons learned, case studies, and practices that have been included in the on-line Reef Resilience toolkit and is designed to accelerate the knowledge and facilitate access to essential information and tools needed to incorporate resilience principles into management strategies.
While the focus of this course is on the problem of coral bleaching and actions that managers can take to address this problem, specifically in the context of Marine Protected Areas, the recommendations and tools can be applied to most threats that coral reefs face today. The program includes key aspects such as:
- An introduction to mass coral bleaching and the ecological and social impacts
- Description of the four main principles of resilience and how to identify factors of resilience
- Recommendations on the design and management of resilient MPAs
This course is free and open to anyone interested in learning about Reef Resilience.
How to enroll in the course:
This free online course is available for you to work through at your own pace. Here are the steps to begin the training:
- Navigate to www.conservationtraining.org <http://home.tnc/workingattnc/learningattnc/development/www.conservationtraining.org>
- If you have not already done so, create an account on ConservationTraining <http://www.conservationtraining.org/> by clicking the ‘Create new account’ link
- Once your account is created and confirmed, log into ConservationTraining <http://www.conservationtraining.org/> and click ‘Reef Resilience – Self-paced’ course
- Enter the course and begin by reading the course description and syllabus
If you’d like more information about Reef Resilience and/or the online course, please email resilience@tnc.org.
CRA’s Comment:
As part of the CRA project, we encourage reef managers in the Caribbean to use this free resource to improve their knowledge and skills in the management of coral reef ecosystems.
