BioReef: An Open, Modular Skeleton for Passive Marine Habitat Regeneration

This preprint presents the BioReef Open Skeleton: a boundary-defined, modular structural framework for passive marine habitat regeneration. The work deliberately restricts itself to the system “bones” — geometry, flow interaction principles, deployment logic, and failure tolerance — while omitting region-specific optimisation, material branding, and closed implementations.

BioReef is intended as an enabling substrate rather than a finished product: a neutral, discipline-agnostic scaffold designed to integrate seamlessly into existing marine restoration, engineering, and ecological practice. The system emphasises robustness, partial-failure tolerance, and ecological succession over performance maximisation, with the explicit goal of supporting long-term reef development under real-world conditions.

The framework is shared openly to encourage independent adaptation, stress-testing, and evolutionary refinement by practitioners already embedded in marine environments. Decision-making is deferred to system-level selection via deployment, colonisation, and persistence rather than prescriptive optimisation.

Keywords

artificial reef
marine restoration
modular infrastructure
passive systems
habitat regeneration
boundary-first design
open schematics
ecological succession