UGM Students Carry Out Bunaken Coral Reef Restoration

KKN students carry out efforts to restore Bunaken’s coral reefs: creating a platform for coral reef transplantation. (MI/Agus Utantoro)

A GROUP of Gadjah Mada University students who are doing KKN PPM (Community Empowerment Learning Real Work Lecture) in Bunaken, North Sulawesi are carrying out coral reef transplantation.

In collaboration with the Bunaken National Park Office and the local community, the students installed 550 transplants in order to restore the ecosystem that was damaged due to the construction of the Bunaken Village Ecotourism pier.

The installation of coral reef transplantation, said the Head of Bunaken National Park, Faat Rudhianto, was carried out during the KKN PPM UGM activity on Bunaken Island from the end of June to be completed on August 19. The method used for coral reef transplantation is the Spider method or spider frame with iron in the form of a hexagonal frame where each iron frame rod will be tied to acropora coral.

“In Bunaken, only about 30% of the coral reefs are damaged so they need transplantation. So, ecosystem restoration is the last resort. Well, the other way is to do it through natural succession, what we do is just maintain, supervise, and monitor the coral reefs there,” said Rudhianto in a written statement received by www.mediaindonesia.com in Yogyakarta, Sunday (11/8).

Rudhianto said the area of ​​coral reefs in Bunaken is around 6,000 hectares with 30% of the coral reefs in need of recovery. “Almost all of the damage is caused by humans,” he explained.

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Other causes of damage are destructive fishing activities by bombing fish and anesthetizing fish with potassium. He further explained that coral reef transplantation is the same as using plants on land which require sunlight for photosynthesis so that the maximum depth of transplant planting is 10 meters.

“This Acropora has quite good resistance to natural conditions, and its growth per year is 1 to 3 cm and 95 percent of the plants we install are successful,” he said.

Meanwhile, the representative of UGM KKN PPM students from the Agro Corps, Kharisma Pundhi Rukmana, said that UGM KKN PPM students had installed 550 coral reef transplant media.

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Although the National Park Office uses the spider method, the students tried to use another coral reef transplantation model, namely by bioriftek. It is said that coral reef preservation uses natural materials, namely coconut shells arranged in tiers using iron planted on square-shaped concrete.

This idea came up according to Pundi when the first week of KKN in Bunaken, he and the team conducted observations throughout the island and saw the potential for coconut shell waste which was quite abundant. “So seeing this potential, we also tried to empower the community to make bioriftek because coconut shells are easy to get and also easy to apply,” he said.

Pundi hopes that if this method is successfully developed in Bunaken, the community can develop it themselves because the resources are quite abundant. “Well, later for the mechanism, the biorieftek is submerged on the seabed and then it will attract new coral reef substrates,” he explained. (N-2)