Guidance for Coastal Ecosystem Restoration and Monitoring to Create or Improve Bird-Nesting Habitat

More than 100 facilitated calls and working sessions were conducted over a period of more than two years. These conversations included input from bird subject matter experts, ecosystem restoration project team members (including project engineers and project managers), and state and federal agency representatives involved in programmatic and project-based coastal restoration. Initially, information was synthesized on preferential nesting bird habitat, then constraints and opportunities within planning, construction, operation, and maintenance of restoration projects were collated for coastal marsh creation, barrier island restoration, and ridge restoration projects constructed in coastal Louisiana. Finally, lessons learned were summarized to determine targeted data or knowledge gaps to improve understanding of linkages between project design and construction and potential habitat value for bird nesting.

This guidance is intended to provide specific and detailed information on designing ecosystem restoration projects to support nesting birds, provided at the scale of an individual ecosystem restoration project. The primary audience is ecosystem restoration project teams, and this guidance is intended to be used during planning, designing, implementing, and monitoring of projects.

The full report is available here.