GEMS Phase I Report: Oyster Reef Restoration
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2020-02-03
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Abstract
Billions of dollars will be spent on large-scale restoration of Gulf ecosystems over the coming decades, but there is no shared platform to guide assessment and reporting of restoration progress and effectiveness for the broad set of environmental, social, and economic goals shared by the many institutions working in the Gulf. The diversity of these goals—including habitat restoration, water quality improvement, marine resource protection, community resilience, and economic revitalization—means that a variety of metrics are needed to fully evaluate the effectiveness of restoration projects. A set of common models and metrics relevant across projects, programs, and locations can facilitate effective project planning and evaluation. While there are existing efforts to collate and standardize ecological and biophysical metrics for Gulf restoration projects (GOMA Monitoring Community of Practice; NRDA Monitoring and Adaptive Management Manual), there is no current effort to do the same for the social, economic, and human well-being outcomes of restoration. This project aims to do that.
The GEMS (Gulf of Mexico Ecosystem Service Logic Models and Socio-Economic Indicators) project aims to advance standardized metrics of restoration success by developing ecosystem service logic models (ESLMs) with stakeholders from the five Gulf states, relevant federal agencies, and technical experts. ESLMs trace the effects of restoration strategies as they influence ecological and social systems to create outcomes that are important to people. The use of logic models is recommended by the National Academies of Science as best practice for monitoring plan design; these models can provide a practical and transferable approach for measuring success at different scales.
The GEMS team will develop ESLMs and metrics for a wide range of coastal restoration approaches over the course of the project. This report presents the results of the first phase of the GEMS project, which focused on oyster reef restoration.
The Phase II report of the GEMS project identifies metrics available to monitor the social and economic outcomes of a wide variety of coastal projects funded in the Gulf, using ESLMs to illustrate how these projects’ impacts cascade through the biophysical system to result in social and economic outcomes.
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Olander, Lydia, Christine Shepard, Heather Tallis, David Yoskowitz, Kara Coffey, Chris Hale, Rachel Karasik, Sara Mason, et al. (2020). GEMS Phase I Report: Oyster Reef Restoration. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26649.
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Lydia Olander
Lydia Olander is a program director at the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment & Sustainability at Duke University and adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. She works on improving evidence-based policy and accelerating implementation of climate resilience, nature-based solutions, natural capital accounting, and environmental markets. She leads the National Ecosystem Services Partnership and sits on Duke’s Climate Commitment action team. She recently spent two years with the Biden administration at the Council on Environmental Quality as Director of Nature based Resilience and before that spent five years on the Environmental Advisory Board for the US Army Corps of Engineers. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and widely published researcher. Prior to joining the Nicholas Institute, she spent a year as an AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow working with Senator Joseph Lieberman on environmental and energy issues. She was a college scholar at Cornell University and earned her Master of Forest Science from Yale University and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Sara Mason
Sara Mason joined the Ecosystem Services Program at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability as a policy associate after graduating from Duke with a master’s degree in environmental management. Her work focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of biodiversity conservation and how that can be leveraged to engage the public and policy makers in conservation efforts. Prior to joining the Nicholas Institute, Sara worked in ecological field research and endangered animal rehabilitation.
Katie Warnell
Katie Warnell is a senior policy associate for the Ecosystem Services Program. She is a graduate of Duke University’s Master of Environment Management program with a concentration in ecosystem science and conservation and was awarded a geospatial analysis certificate. She has served as an intern at the Triangle Land Conservancy and as a research tech with the Duke University Superfund Research Center. She has conducted research on South Africa’s bats with the Organization for Tropical Studies and was involved in a DukeEngage project on fish farming in Ecuador.
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