Coordinators
Joanne Preston
Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Portsmouth
Dr Joanne Preston is a Marine Biologist based at the Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Portsmouth. She founded the UK/Ireland Native Oyster Network in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London to catalyse a national approach and scale of oyster habitat restoration and facilitate best practice in management and monitoring of flat oyster restoration projects. Dr Preston provides scientific leadership for the Solent Oyster Restoration Project in collaboration with Blue Marine Foundation to enable research driven practice and support adaptive management.
Boze Hancock
Scientist for TNC’s Global Oceans Team
Boze assists in developing marine habitat restoration in new geographies and provides technical support for partners and numerous restoration projects throughout TNC’s global portfolio. He also works to provide the science support for marine habitat restoration, particularly through quantifying the ecosystem services these habitats provide human communities, such as coastal protection, fish production and improved water quality. He also focusses on making the results available to the marine policycommunity and restoration practitioners (eg. https://oceanwealth.org/tools/oyster-calculator/). He is also working with the Society for Ecological Restoration to help align our work with the language and structure developed by SER to help unify the field ahead of the UN Decade of Ecological Restoration.
Introduction
As restoration of Ostrea edulis habitat in Europe scales up and is adopted in a growing number of sites, it is important that lessons learned from existing projects can be effectively communicated and understood. Given that projects have a limited number of resources and are unable to test all possibilities themselves, it is helpful if work undertaken in one location can be translated to another. In order to facilitate this learning, NORA is proud to support the Monitoring Working Group in drafting pan-European monitoring guidelines.
The work to develop monitoring guidelines was started by the UK-Ireland Native Oyster Network in 2018. In December 2019 the UK-Ireland Network hosted a workshop in Portsmouth University, in collaboration with NORA, to agree on and develop the guidelines further. The workshop was funded by the University of Portsmouth, EU Life Project, John Ellerman.
As a result of this workshop, the Monitoring handbook was published in Nov 2021 as part of the suite of handbooks to aid in native oyster restoration practice, biosecurity and monitoring. The monitoring handbook objective was to collectively agree a suite of monitoring metrics and methods that is implemented by restoration projects to assess the progress, scale, success and failures or restoration efforts and activities. This monitoring handbook was the first step to achieve the
Berlin Recommendations No. 5 = Create Common monitoring protocols.
Background: Native oyster restoration is in its infancy in Europe. There are numerous outstanding questions regarding best practice for restoration of the European native oyster. A shared monitoring protocol will allow lessons and outcomes to be shared between all European restoration efforts. This will reduce duplication of effort and ensure that progress towards successful restoration is as rapid as possible.
Recommendation: Monitoring protocols that will provide comparable results for projects throughout Europe and for restored sites should be developed and followed. Where possible, monitoring should include the assessment of ecosystem services on a habitat and ecosystem scale.
In reality, the implementation of common monitoring protocols is challenging across the highly varied conditions, and context of different restoration projects occurring at very different locations across the biogeographic range of Ostrea edulis. For example, some are deeper water projects in the North Sea, others are intertidal in the Mediterranean.
However, if we are to compare these projects, collecting comparable data will be a very powerful tool to enabling us to learn, up-scale, refine and communicate to policy makers and funders, the wider impact of native oyster restoration (e.g. by quantifying ecosystem service provision).
Our WG Monitoring strategy lays out how we intend to achieve this as a commuity.
Alongside the monitoring guidelines, the NORA community of experts came together to undertake a Priority Setting Exercise to identify the Forty questions of importance to the policy and practice of native oyster reef restoration in Europe. (zu Ermgassen et al 2020) Restoration of Ostrea edulis habitat is still in at a pilot or experimental phase for most projects.
If you would like to join the Monitoring Working Group, please get in touch with Joanne Preston joanne.preston@port.ac.uk or Boze Hancock bhancock@TNC.ORG.