Project Restore: Restoring Sydney Harbour’ SeascapesHabitat Restoration, Rehabilitation & Enhancement

Francisco Martínez-Baena¹, Melanie Bishop², David Booth³, Katherine Dafforn², Martina Doblin¹, Ezequiel Marzinelli⁴, Mariana Mayer-Pinto⁵, Adriana Vergés⁵

¹Sydney Institute of Marine Science, Australia - ²Macquarie University, Australia - ³University of Technology Sydney, Australia - ⁴The University of Sydney, Australia - ⁵The University of New South Wales, Australia

As awareness of the extent of marine habitat degradation has grown, so too have attempts to repair them, through a combination of restoration, rehabilitation and eco-engineering. Programs targeting seagrass and seaweed restoration, marine eco-engineering and habitat enhancement research have developed methodologies that successfully repair individual habitats, but have to date been uncoordinated in their efforts. Project Restore brings these programs together for the first time to address whether multi-habitat, seascape level, restoration can bring greater ecological benefit than individual habitat repair conducted in isolation. In Sydney Harbour, restoration sites were established with sites selected where a combination of multiple types of habitat (seascape) repair are conducted together, and where single type of repair is being conducted alone. We expect that compared to degraded control sites, ecological benefits will be seen both at sites with either seascape or individual habitat repair. However, we also expect that recovery towards a reference (less degraded) state (as measured by metrics of ecological structure, function and connectivity) will be greater at sites with seascape versus single habitat repair. Project Restore provides a template for best practice marine seascape repair and will provide valuable insights into the ecological recovery processes at different spatial scales in an urbanised estuary.