India, Sept. 28 -- In 1969, Australian pilot Don Adams landed on Lady Elliot Island, a tiny coral cay off the coast of Queensland. There was barely any life on it. A subsequent peer-reviewed study of the island's recovery published in the Australian Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering described how the island had been almost completely bare after about a decade of guano mining in the 1800s. Adams looked at that wasteland and saw something worth saving. What followed was one of Australia's longest environmental turnaround stories, and it is still unfolding more than 50 years later.

Lady Elliot Island is the southernmost island in the Great Barrier Reef. The island sits about eight kilometers from the edge of the continental shelf, w...