Coral reef recovery through recruitment of new corals

How long does it take coral reefs to recover from mass mortality events, how different are the communities that come back, and are they more or less resilient to future heatwaves? We aim to find out. For three years (COVID created a pause in this project) after 2015-2016 El Niño, we monitoring coral recruitment through the use of recruitment tiles. The coral recruits (babies) land on these tiles and then upon re-collecting them, we can count and identify each recruit. This will aid us in characterizing what coral species are making a comeback.