This revival is for anyone to grow

Raised on a pearl farm on the atoll of Ahe, Titouan Bernicot’s early life was surrounded 360 degrees by coral reefs.

On a surf trip in his teens, he saw miles of bleached white reef where there should’ve been colour. After learning it was a global problem, he rounded up his friends, a group of surf bums and island kids, and decided to do something about it. They called themselves Coral Gardeners.

One fragment turned into two, and eventually, more than 3,000 corals were planted through their coral adoption program, allowing anyone to support the mission from anywhere in the world.

The Gardeners began sharing their knowledge around the island, in classrooms, workshops, and eco-tours. They left the island for the first time to speak at conferences across Paris, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. It was the first time some of the Gardeners saw snow.

2019 closed off with a wave of momentum for the project. A campaign with influencer Alexis Ren went viral, reaching over 100 million people and growing their Instagram following to 500k ocean advocates almost overnight.

Suddenly, the grassroots project from Mo’orea had a global audience, even though inside HQ, some of the team were still sleeping on bunk beds. But not for long.

The ex-Tesla engineer raised money to set up an in-house R&D centre called CG Labs. Their first development was an AI system called ReefOS. On the field, the second Blackbird was purchased, giving Gardeners additional mobility to restore more locations and deploy underwater monitoring tech.

Later that year, a Nat Geo grant submission came back successful, leading to the first, and then second, week-long Outbound Mission to the Tuamotu Archipelago, where the team ventured for the first time to new islands, learning about different ecosystems and expanding their restoration knowledge by working closely with the local communities there.

From a handful of friends to 30 full-time team members, their mission was gaining traction in and out of the water. The Gardeners doubled their planting numbers when compared to the previous five years, and operations scaled beyond Mo'orea to three more French Polynesian islands.

Operating on island time, Titouan never owned or learned how to read an analog watch until Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative joined as an ongoing partner in 2022, gifting him his first watch. The partnership also introduced Titouan to Dr Sylvia Earle, who would become his ‘ocean sister,’ advocate and mentor.

The tools developed by CG Labs began to transform the nurseries into living scientific laboratories for reef restoration. The creation of ReefMAP, ReefCAM and ReefAPP brought new levels of accuracy, speed and accessibility into the hands of the Gardeners. They were finally able to swap writing on underwater slates for using an iPhone.

The Gardeners continued expanding their efforts across French Polynesia. Back on Titouan’s home islands of Ahe, they began repurposing old pearl farms, turning them into coral restoration hubs led by local youth. They used the pearl farm lines to grow corals on suspended ropes descending 50 meters into the ocean. The project’s innovation was recognized by the French Coral Reef Initiative (IFRECOR), and the Gardeners took home the To’a Reef Grand Prize for their ingenuity on the field.

As the urgency to protect the reef increased, a collaboration between CG Labs and UC Santa Barbara formed to expedite an emerging monitoring tool called eDNA into the field sooner. A proposal was submitted to Minderoo Foundation and they agreed to fund the project.

As part of their partnership with the SEA BEYOND initiative, a project by Prada and UNESCO, the CG team set off on an expedition to pilot their methodologies on a temperate system. Joined by National Geographic Explorer and marine biologist Dr Giovanni Chimienti, they scoped their first new region beyond the Pacific: the Mediterranean.