Beyond opportunistic restoration: The need, approach, and challenges of developing and implementing strategic nearshore ecosystem restoration in Puget Sound, WA

Early emergence of coastal wetland restoration based on mitigation and small-scale, opportunistic, single project actions has significantly advanced both the science and technology of restoration ecology.  However, the long-term sustainability of many wetlands and their ecosystem goods and services are dependent on their cumulative effects in the matrix of coastal/estuarine landscapes.  Consequentially, restoration of wetland landscapes cannot effectively reverse the decline of coastal wetlands until it is strategic, comprehensive, spatially-explicit and founded on re-establishment of landscape-scale ecosystem processes.  However, while single restoration actions are often embraced by, or even promoted by, local human communities, large-scale ecological restoration actions will conflict with the shifting baseline that now involves the imprint of human dimensions—economic, social, cultural and political—in more developed landscapes.  One of the greater, but oft neglected, challenges is to equitably accommodate the diverse voices representing these landscapes and fully inform them of the trade-offs among alternative restoration actions, or of not taking action at all.  Planning processes that weight, prejudge and filter technical information jeopardize the credibility of any attempt to balance our attempt to achieve sustainable ecosystems that balance all goods and services. An example from a developing restoration initiative in Puget Sound, Washington (USA), contrasted to experiences in hurricane-compromised coastal Louisiana and heavily urbanized San Francisco Bay-Delta, indicates how this challenge is being addressed to various degrees.  Differences in approaches to planning processes, predictions of human and ecological landscapes in the absence of restoration, assessment of trade-offs among restoration alternatives, and governance in comprehensive coastal restoration programs provide some potentially valuable and transferable ‘lessons learned,’ albeit still poorly informed or transmitted.  Our ultimate ability to restore sustainable coastal landscapes that embrace human dimensions, as well as biotic resources and other goods and services, may depend on a more informed dialogue about many of such ‘lessons learned’.