Challenges in Marine Restoration Ecology: How Techniques, Assessment Metrics, and Ecosystem Valuation Can Lead to Improved Restoration Success

Abstract

Evaluating the effectiveness and success of coastal marine habitat restoration is often highly challenging and can vary substantially between different habitat types. The current article presents a state-of-the-art review of habitatlevel restoration in the coastal marine environment. It sets out most successful techniques across habitats and suggestions of better metrics to assess their success. Improvements in restoration approach are outlined, with a particular focus on selective breeding, using recent advancements in genetics. Furthermore, the assessment of ecosystem services, as a metric to determine restoration success on a spatiotemporal scale, is addressed in this article. As the concept of ecosystem services is more tangible for a nonscientific audience, evaluating restoration success in this manner has the potential to greatly contribute to raising awareness of environmental issues and to implement socioeconomic policies. Moreover, habitatbased restoration has been proven to be an effective tool to address the issue of ecosystem service sustainability and poverty alleviation. Appropriate conservation management, prior to the implementation of restoration activities, is crucial to create an environment in which restoration efforts are likely to succeed.

Priorities and Motivations of Marine Coastal Restoration Research

“…Assessments based on peerreviewed literature show that restoration progress is commonly reported by variables related to biodiversity, vegetation structure or ecological functions (Ruiz-Jaen and Mitchell Aide, 2005;Basconi et al, 2020). Expanding the variables monitored in marine coastal restoration (e.g., monitoring ecosystem function or ecosystem services more effectively than simply assessing growth/productivity and survival) is an important step toward capturing socio-economic outcomes, to improve the effectiveness of restoration and alignment with the motivations of stakeholders sectors such as fishing, aquaculture, governments, tourism and water utilities/managers (Fonseca et al, 2000;Paling et al, 2009;Basconi et al, 2020).…”

“…Increased diversification of financing will be required to enable wider adoption and scaling-up of marine coastal restoration, to meet ambitious recent targets (e.g., increasing the global mangrove area by 20% by 2030 within the 'Global Mangrove Alliance' -a coalition of global conservation organizations Waltham et al, 2020). Opportunities such as market-based mechanisms to fund marine coastal restoration, including payment for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon storage or nutrient cycling) may increase resources available for restoration (Basconi et al, 2020). Additionally, a combination of government funding in conjunction with supportive policy has been found to leverage substantial private funding for large-scale marine coastal restoration in the USA, an approach which could be more widely implemented (Waltham et al, 2020).…”

“…Following the methods by Bakker et al (2010), we extracted data from the acknowledgments section of each primary study and identified the funding sources as a combination of: (1) government funding, (2) non-government funding, (3) private investments by businesses, individuals or philanthropy, and (4) projects supported by volunteer labor.…”

Indicators of Coastal Wetlands Restoration Success: A Systematic Review

“…These indicators were assessing varied part of faunal structure such as nekton density (Bell et al, 1993), crab shell width (Russell et al, 2011), or fish age class distribution (Dibble and Meyerson, 2012). This diversity of indicators makes it difficult to estimate projects' success as the use of one metric over another can result in different outcomes (Basconi et al, 2020). There is a need to provide a common base to assess coastal wetlands restoration projects in order to obtain a clear and comparable success assessment.…”

“…Over the last 20 years, restoration projects have been increasingly implemented all over the world (Swan et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2018;Basconi et al, 2020). Restoration science is anticipated to become one of the most important fields within conservation science of the twenty-first century (Hobbs and Harris, 2001).…”