Keynote (30 minutes) Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting 2023

KEYNOTE: Harnessing positive interactions across multiple habitats is needed to enhance coastal marine restoration success (#315)

Maria Vozzo 1 , Ana Bugnot 1 , Megan Saunders 1
  1. CSIRO Environment, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Coastal marine seascapes are comprised of interconnected habitats where their density, diversity and spatial distributions are shaped by the biophysical and ecological processes occurring among them. Cross-habitat facilitation, where processes generated in one habitat benefit another (e.g. wave attenuation, sediment stabilisation), naturally underpins coastal ecosystem development, resilience and expansion but restoration of coastal marine habitats has traditionally focused on single- rather than multi-habitat approaches. Over 200 facilitative interactions between pairs of coastal marine habitats were identified in a systematic review, but 85% of them were described on scales <1m. Further, just 0.002% of studies on coastal marine restoration restored multiple habitats concurrently. Using geospatial analyses on case studies from southeast Australia, we can infer how spatial patterns among coastal marine habitats may be influenced by environmental setting, estimate how facilitation occurs across the seascape, and the implications for utilising cross-habitat facilitation in restoration practice. Results show there is a disconnect between the spatial scales over which cross-habitat facilitation is occurring, and the scales over which restoration is generally conducted. To achieve global biodiversity and restoration targets, successful scaling-up of restoration requires a focus on rebuilding multiple, connected habitats within seascapes to systematically harness cross-habitat facilitation.