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Despite the goods and services that marine coastal ecosystems provide to humans (UNEP, 2006), ecosystems such as coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves, saltmarsh, and oyster reefs are being lost at alarming rates worldwide mainly due to unsustainable land use, coastal development and climate change (Orth et al., 2000; Valiela et al., 2001; Pandolfi et al., 2003; Duke et al., 2007). Protection alone cannot solve this problem, as many areas have little natural habitat left to conserve, are facing extinction (Aronson and Precht, 2001) or have already become functionally extinct globally (Beck et al., 2011). Ecological restoration or “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (SER, 2004) is urgently needed to assist ecosystems where natural recovery is hindered or impeded (Perrow and Davy, 2002). Ecological restoration principally seeks to recover the functioning of degraded ecosystems, however restoration of marine and coastal habitats can provide a range of ecological and socio-economic benefits, such as coastal protection from flooding and erosion, fisheries habitat, water quality improvements, and carbon sequestration and storage (Duarte et al., 2013; Fodrie et al., 2017; Macreadie et al., 2017; Abrantes et al., 2019; Gilby et al., 2020). The United Nations General Assembly recently declared the “UN Decade on Ecological Restoration” for 2021–2030 and ecological restoration is on the rise as a component of the solution to ameliorate ecosystem degradation (Possingham et al., 2015). For example, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals call for restoration of marine coastal ecosystems (Goal 14). Marine coastal restoration plays a paramount role in the current focus on nature-based solutions to address global societal challenges (e.g., climate change adaptation and mitigation, supporting fisheries) (Cohen-Shacham et al., 2016) that are presently being advocated across government and industry and will feature as a key topic at upcoming global forums (e.g., UN Oceans Conference, Lisbon in 2020; Post-2020 global biodiversity framework for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity). Despite these high-level goals, a synthetic picture on what motivates people on the ground to undertake restoration in marine coastal ecosystems is lacking.

Restoration is a human undertaking; therefore, it is critical to understand the motivations of individuals and organizations to conduct restoration, and how those motivations relate to project outcomes or funding sources. Understanding motivations, defined as “a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way” (oxford dictionary), has been well-assessed in various fields of socio-ecological research, for instance, to assess the reasons for people to engage in community-based conservation (Nilsson et al., 2016), to conserve urban biodiversity (Dearborn and Kark, 2010), or to volunteer in marine conservation programs (Kitney et al., 2018). The reasons or motivations why terrestrial ecosystems are restored have been described as “numerous, disparate, generally understated, and commonly underappreciated” (Clewell and Aronson, 2006). Little is known about the motivations of individuals or organizations to undertake restoration in marine and coastal environments. When we understand people's motivations, we can engage them toward achieving common goals. Therefore, understanding the motivations of individuals and organizations to restore are essential to better align these with the desired project outcomes, funding sources, and to overcome the barriers to scaling-up marine coastal restoration practice.

Motivations for a particular restoration project may be complex, as there are likely multiple agents, governance structures, and funding sources involved. For instance, marine coastal restoration projects form part of many government and non-government environmental programs, which are being implemented by a range of stakeholders including community and Indigenous groups, conservation groups, not-for-profit organizations, and private companies. Scaling-up restoration efforts to meet international commitments (UNEP, 2019), necessarily involves a larger number and variety of stakeholders, which requires consideration of multiple motivations (Wyborn et al., 2012; Menz et al., 2013). It also requires stronger government policy, sustained funding, improving the relationships with existing restoration networks and community engagement (Gillies et al., 2015). This is particularly important for designing large-scale restoration programs which are carried out by multiple stakeholders. Recognizing and integrating different motivations in setting restoration goals and evaluating outcomes against these goals, can allow projects to deliver multiple benefits, help resolve stakeholder conflict, and sustain stakeholder commitments to restoration in the long-term (Hagger et al., 2017). Furthermore, customizing incentives to cater for diverse stakeholder motivations can also encourage restoration projects (Jellinek et al., 2019).

Motivations for restoration can be categorized into five broad categories: biotic (motivations aligned with the desire to recover lost aspects of local biodiversity), idealistic (personal and cultural expressions of concern or atonement for environmental degradation, reengagement with nature, and/or spiritual fulfillment), heuristic (attempts to elicit or demonstrate ecological principles and biotic expressions), technocratic (restoration that is conducted by government agencies or other large organizations to satisfy specific institutional missions and mandates) and pragmatic (recover or repair ecosystems for their capacity to provide a broad array of natural services and products upon which human economies depend and to counteract extremes in climate caused by ecosystem loss) (Clewell and Aronson, 2006). This framework was applied by Hagger et al. (2017) to evaluate the reasons why people restore terrestrial habitats and how this influences planning and monitoring approaches to achieve desired outcomes. So far, in a marine context, the framework has only been used to understand the reasons of the scientific community to restore coral reefs, which were largely focused on improving the restoration approach and answering questions of ecological concern, i.e., heuristic/experimental motivations (Bayraktarov et al., 2019). Little is known about the reasons of scientists to restore other marine coastal habitats and whether these motivations differ among coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves, saltmarsh, and oyster reefs.

The Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) was founded in 1988 to “advance the science, practice and policy of ecological restoration to sustain biodiversity, improve resilience in a changing climate, and re-establish an ecologically healthy relationship between nature and culture” (SER, 2020)¹. The International Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration (first edition released by SER, 2016) contain a number of best practice guidelines developed over decades of research and practice from well-established restoration of terrestrial habitats, however is aimed to be transferrable to marine and freshwater ecosystems (McDonald et al., 2016). SER have developed many tools to help restoration practitioners track their progress toward a full ecosystem restoration, such as the “recovery wheel” used to assess advancement based on metrics categorized under the attributes: absence of threats; ecosystem function; external exchanges; physical conditions; species composition; and structural diversity (McDonald et al., 2016). In addition to best practices and metrics, the outcomes from a restoration project can be categorized into ecological, social and economic or a combination thereof following the framework by Wortley et al. (2013). For marine coastal restoration, we do not currently know: (1) whether the best practice standards toward a full ecosystem recovery proposed by SER have been applied; (2) which metrics have been measured to assess recovery; and (3) what the intended outcomes for the restoration projects were.

Allocation of funding may be considered a metric of an organization's level of interest in a subject, therefore, assessing funding sources in relation to motivations for marine restoration helps us to discern the motivations of organizations. Reported marine coastal restoration costs range from USD $9,000 ha⁻¹ for mangrove restoration where large contributions of effort by communities and volunteers are common (Bayraktarov et al., 2016a) to USD $400,000 ha⁻¹ for coral reefs which often involve logistical constraints to reach the restoration sites (Bayraktarov et al., 2019). While investment in conservation of biodiversity continues to be limited and is simply not enough to meet global biodiversity targets (James et al., 1999; McCarthy et al., 2012), it has to be carefully evaluated in its effectiveness to actually make a change for biodiversity (Ferraro and Pattanayak, 2006).

Information on restoration projects can be obtained from either the scientific process of examining peer-reviewed papers, or through gray literature such as newspaper reports, newsletters, targeted interviews, or government reports. The knowledge from the former source can be accessed through systematic literature review while the latter is more difficult to synthesize. It is not known what the motivations to restore marine coastal ecosystems from either of these sources are and whether they are aligned with the broader needs to reach restoration at scales. These are: to build a business case and awareness that restoration is feasible, develop a policy framework that enables restoration, to build skills and experience in restoration practitioners and to learn from the expertise of terrestrial restoration and adopt best practices (Gillies et al., 2015). Here we focus on the scientific community, their priorities and motivations to restore marine coastal ecosystems.

We systematically review empirical results from the published literature, with the inclusion of some gray literature and personal communications, to elucidate the reasons why (mostly) scientists engage in the field of marine coastal restoration. We specifically answer the questions: (1) what priorities and motivations do scientists have to engage in marine coastal restoration; (2) do motivations to engage vary between different ecosystems; (3) what are the metrics measured and which restoration attributes did they assess; (4) were best practices for ecological restoration applied; and (5) what is the nature of funding to carry out restoration projects? We answer these questions by expanding and updating a global systematic review focused on cost and feasibility assessments of marine coastal restoration (Bayraktarov et al., 2016a), to compare the results across five ecosystems: coral reefs, seagrass, mangroves, saltmarsh and oyster reefs.

This paper assesses the motivations underpinning marine coastal restoration as reported primarily by scientists in peer-reviewed scientific literature. The analysis builds off a published database of 235 papers on marine coastal restoration projects which was developed using search criteria aimed at quantifying the cost and feasibility of marine coastal restoration (Bayraktarov et al., 2016a,b). For the purpose of this study the database was updated with more recent literature and expanded to include information on the motivations, outcomes, and funding sources of the research. We used a modified version of the framework by Clewell and Aronson (2006) as adopted by Bayraktarov et al. (2019) for corals reefs to categorize the motivations of the restoration projects. Coral reef data presented in this paper was previously published (Bayraktarov et al., 2019) and is included here as a comparison to four other ecosystems.

Based on a published database of primarily published literature, we found that scientists who engaged in marine coastal restoration globally were mainly motivated by experimental reasons i.e., to improve the restoration approach and/or answer ecological questions. This differs from the survey results obtained from terrestrial restoration practitioners across Australia, who were mainly motivated by biodiversity enhancement and also biodiversity offsetting, water quality improvements, and social reasons (Hagger et al., 2017). It is yet to be explored whether surveying marine coastal practitioners would lead to similar results. Our results based on the scientific literature may reflect a lag in development of the field, where restoration approaches for coral, kelp and seagrass in particular are still in the proof-of-concept phase, focused at small-scale experimental interventions (Bayraktarov et al., 2016a) and not yet (widely) aiming to maximize biodiversity or the provision of ecosystem services. This finding might also be biased by the difference in motivation of those who do research with publication as a key motivation (i.e., scientists and students), vs. those involved in the practice and operationalization of large-scale restoration projects (NGOs, natural resource management bodies, community groups, governments, consultants, developers etc.). For example, a study that used a systematic review to assess the global literature of marine coastal restoration found that ca. 84% of published studies included an author affiliated with a university (Zhang et al., 2018).

It is also questionable whether restoration for the purpose of methodology development should be considered “restoration” sensu stricto as per definition of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER). Projects aiming at an improvement of the restoration approach are typically carried out at small scales (Bayraktarov et al., 2016a) and do not aim to achieve a full ecosystem recovery (this study). We observed that restoration of coral reefs in low income and lower-middle income countries followed the experimental rationale, however, this was only the case for seven studies on mangrove restoration. In countries with low and lower-middle income economies, mangrove restoration was motivated by pragmatic, biotic, social and legislative reasons, potentially due to the growing interest in carbon storage, livelihood creation and nature-based solutions (Grabowski and Peterson, 2007; Greiner et al., 2013; Cohen-Shacham et al., 2016; Macreadie et al., 2017). All records on the restoration of seagrass, saltmarsh and oyster reefs in our database were from countries with a high or upper-middle income economy and cases from countries with low and lower-middle income economies remain unknown to the published literature.

Motivations of scientists to engage in marine coastal restoration vary among ecosystems. While the restoration of most ecosystems described here were motivated by an experimental rationale, mangrove restoration differed in that projects were equally motivated by biotic, experimental, and pragmatic rationales. Mangrove restoration projects also deviated in the type of outcomes reported. While projects for most ecosystems reported a purely ecological outcome, mangrove restoration research often considered socio-economic implications of the restoration intervention and had the highest proportion of social and socio-economic variables included as metrics of achieving outcomes. Many of the published studies recommended greater efforts to incorporate social, economic, and cultural factors in assessing the effectiveness of ecological restoration e.g., Ruiz-Jaen and Mitchell Aide (2005), indicating that this is a priority for future marine restoration practice. Restoration of mangroves is less expensive, has been accomplished over larger areas, and it has higher survival of restored organisms than the other coastal ecosystems (Bayraktarov et al., 2016a). Failures of mangrove restoration have occurred, but this has been largely associated with poor site selection, often driven by social factors (Lee et al., 2019). The feasibility of mangrove restoration may be due to being practiced for a relatively long duration (since at least 1977, with reforestation of mangroves dating back to the early 1900s, Primavera and Esteban, 2008) and has efficient methods, while restoration of other marine coastal ecosystems may need to mature. The maturity of mangrove restoration was evident in the reduced focus on improving methods compared to the other ecosystems. There also tended to be higher levels of involvement of communities and support by volunteer labor in mangrove restoration (Brown et al., 2014) which may also contribute to successful projects at larger spatial scales. Greater accessibility to the restoration sites by communities may also contribute to enhanced success of mangrove restoration which can be carried out by fishermen and small boats, in comparison to ecosystems like coral reefs, oyster reefs and seagrass which require underwater activities and other logistics (e.g., divers, SCUBA equipment).

This analysis included three main biases inherent in the database: (1) a large number of papers in the field of research of marine coastal restoration are omitted due to a relatively narrow scope provided by the original search terms (“cost,” “feasibility,” and or “survival”); (2) much of the knowledge from practitioners who conduct restoration, and whom have less incentive to publish in the literature, are omitted; (3) the database is comprised of records mainly in English and a few entries in Spanish. Despite these limitations, the analysis is systematic and repeatable, and the biases are consistent across the five ecosystems. Therefore, while the results may not paint a complete picture of the motivations for marine ecological restoration in general, and do not canvass the full body of literature in the field, the results can be used to compare general trends for scientists studying restoration across the five coastal ecosystems. A more comprehensive search that goes beyond the publication bias, capturing newspaper articles, newsletters, social media posts, blogs, YouTube videos, and incorporates targeted interviews with marine coastal restoration practitioners may yield different results because it would represent the motivations of the wider restoration community.

The focus of restoration on experimental motivations may not be surprising when data are assessed from the published scientific literature. Many restoration practitioners may not publish results because of limited resources, and thus their motivations for restoration may differ from what we have found in our assessment of the scientific literature. This is a general trend in conservation where there is still a gap between conservation science and practice (Sunderland et al., 2009; Milner-Gulland et al., 2010). Studies where motivations were gleaned by surveying restoration practitioners have found primarily biotic, pragmatic or social rationales for restoration, e.g., Bernhardt et al. (2007) and Hagger et al. (2017). Information on large-scale restoration and in countries where English is not the main language is often not published, with only few exceptions, e.g., Bayraktarov et al. (2020), and we may be missing out on more than 35% of the knowledge in conservation if peer-reviewed literature searches are restricted to English (Amano et al., 2016). Another caveat is that funding provided by the research institution in terms of salaries and facilities are rarely acknowledged in a scientific publication. The results presented here may largely ignore the contributions of academic institutions and academics who often volunteer their time to carry out the research.

The most common metrics recorded in marine coastal restoration research were growth/productivity, survivorship, habitat function, physical attributes and reproduction. This is in line with plant survival being the most commonly used metric in terrestrial restoration practice, followed by absence of weeds or pest animals, plant species diversity, and vegetation cover (Hagger et al., 2017). Assessments based on peer-reviewed 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).

Restoration projects presented here were primarily funded by government agencies, either alone or in combination with other funding contributors. Restoration forms part of many government and non-government environmental programs, and is implemented by a diverse range of stakeholders, from community groups and not-for-profit organizations, to private companies and government agencies (Hobbs, 2017; Maron and Louis, 2018). 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). For example, the “Mangroves for the Future” program, established under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Development Program, and involving many institutional partners, have promoted large-scale planting of mangroves throughout Southeast and South Asia.

Most of the projects we assessed did not address the six key standards of the International Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration by McDonald et al. (2016). This is not necessarily surprising, given that the standards were first released in late 2016, while the restoration projects described here were implemented between 1974 and 2018, and that two thirds of the studies were motivated by experimental reasons. The earliest studies in our database were published in 1974 by seagrass, followed by 1977 for mangroves, 1988 for saltmarsh, 1991 for coral reefs and 1999 for oyster reefs. While the limited number of projects and studies prevented us from assessing changes in adoption of the SER concepts embedded in projects over time, our study provides a baseline assessment from which future studies can assess changes in the application of best practices in restoration projects, which are key to scaling-up restoration of marine coastal ecosystems and achieving economies of scale (Gillies et al., 2015; Bayraktarov et al., 2016a; McDonald et al., 2016; van Katwijk et al., 2016). Nevertheless, it should be noted that there are other, equally valuable reasons for restoring marine and coastal habitat that go beyond SER's goal of reaching full ecosystem restoration, which may expand future restoration initiatives. Examples include restoration for socioeconomic and cultural benefits (Kittinger et al., 2016), building/engineering with nature for green infrastructure and urbanization control (Vargas-Hernández and Zdunek-Wielgołaska, 2020) or to explore the value of reconstructed novel ecosystems (Hobbs et al., 2006) as nature-based solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation (e.g., for costal protection, Reguero et al., 2018).

The hurdles that many marine coastal restoration practitioners experience are typically not related to the restoration approach or technique but rather deal with finding agreements between the different stakeholders involved, having a policy framework which allows for the implementation of the restoration projects, a clear legislation related to biodiversity offsets, and competition between different organization carrying out restoration (Menz et al., 2013; Gillies et al., 2015; Waltham et al., 2020; Stewart-Sinclair et al. submitted). To increase access to information on practitioner-led restoration activities and showcase how barriers to marine coastal restoration can be overcome, we recommend that practitioners connect with existing coastal ecosystem networks, such as the Global Mangrove Alliance or Seagrass Watch, and encourage data sharing (Worthington et al., 2020). Better guidance for data gathering and monitoring would assist in disseminating information and evaluating outcomes to support future funding.

Our work based on systematic literature review suggests that the restoration of marine coastal ecosystems is a developing field of conservation, with the scientific community still largely motivated by evaluation of experimental approaches. While the restoration of some ecosystems (e.g., coral reefs, seagrass, saltmarsh, and oyster reefs) may still be in a rapidly developing proof-of-concept phase, the scientific community carrying out mangrove restoration has begun to be motivated by, and engage in, a broader consideration of socio-economic and other benefits, similar to motivations reported for restoration of terrestrial ecosystems. We found that government funding supports most projects with matching involvement from a range of other sectors. Increased involvement from other sectors could increase resources available for marine and coastal restoration which may push restoration science along a developing trajectory beyond small-scale experimental studies. We show that marine coastal restoration research is still much focused on experimental work, while it requires a better alignment with the real needs for scaling-up future efforts such as counteracting the biodiversity decline, solving issues around biodiversity offset policy, reaching resilience goals by providing ecosystems services for climate change adaptation and mitigation to humans, and achieving community acceptance and participation. More science on the socio-economic benefits from restoring marine coastal ecosystems is needed to be able to connect restoration research to policy and people.

The datasets generated for this study can be found in the Dryad Digital Repository: https://datadryad.org/stash/share/MKbsS4eQh7w5RjXK4_wXZJawc-gAvdA_FhGvJk0VlPE.

EB, SB, VH, and KW conceived and designed the research. EB and SB carried out data extraction from the published literature. EB, CS, and VH analyzed the data. EB, SB, VH, CS, CL, KW, CG, AS, and MS wrote and edited the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.