ADRIA stands for Adaptive Dynamic Reef Intervention Algorithms.
ADRIA is a decision-support platform for guided reef restoration and adaptation.
In short, ADRIA informs intervention-deployment decisions in complex environmental, ecological, and socio-economic settings.
Users engage with ADRIA to set the decision criteria, spatial objectives, time horizons, risk tolerance, and performance metrics. Outputs are the scope for one or more new interventions to support reef-ecosystem services relative to the status quo for different climate-change scenarios.
We developed ADRIA on behalf of AIMS (Australian Institute of Marine Science) and the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP) as a decision-support tool for the Great Barrier Reef. Its purpose is to guide the deployment of warm-adapted corals and localized shading to maximise scope to support tourism, fishing, and non-use (existence) benefits.
ADRIA guides intervention decisions under uncertainty by exploring deployment choices and their outcomes in space and time. It models benefits and risks in dynamic settings of reef and site connectivity, heat stress, wave stress, coral cover, coral carrying capacity, management zones, costs, logistics, and a range of other criteria.
Using ADRIA we show that the realization of those benefits depends critically on the speed and effectiveness of R&D, and both early and guided intervention deployment.
Outcomes are highly sensitive to intervention efficacy and assumptions for the rate of natural adaptation.
While guided intervention using ADRIA may help create significant returns on intervention investments for reefs and people in the short and medium-term, long-term sustained outcomes are only possible when combined with climate change mitigation.
See more about our complex-systems approach.