The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) provided the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Restoration Center with $167 million for coastal habitat restoration projects.
As part of this effort, The Nature Conservancy led eight coastal restoration projects totaling approximately $24.5 million. Many of these sites were expansions of restoration work that began as demonstration projects supported through the TNC and NOAA partnership.
Documenting project success in terms of benefits for people and nature was a critical component of each project that included metrics focused job creation. As a condition of funding, each project has well defined scientific monitoring plans that demonstrate the promise of taking restoration to regional scales. These can be viewed in more detail on each project page.
The Recovery Act projects focused on the economic benefits of the restoration work itself, measured in job creation and labor hours. Implementation of such large-scale “green” infrastructure projects required a diverse combination of teams, workers and materials, all of which were vigorously tracked. These projects will help created future ancillary jobs and benefits by sustaining fisheries, providing opportunities for ecotourism and protecting local economies and properties from damages caused from storm surges and flooding. Read more about how habitat restoration stacks up against other infrastructure projects.
The Recovery Act coastal habitat restoration projects were successful because they engaged communities, solved restoration challenges with innovative thinking and collaborative partnerships, and built upon the scientific underpinning for restoration methods and monitoring protocols used to document the outcomes of the larger-scale restoration.
For more information, click on one of the projects below:
Alabama – Coastal Alabama Restoration Project
Alaska – Southeast Alaska Salmon Habitat Restoration Project
California – Big Springs Creek and Shasta River Restoration Project
Florida/USVI – Coral Recovery and Restoration Project
Hawaii – Maunalua Bay Reef Restoration Project
Louisiana – Grand Isle and St. Bernard Marsh Shoreline Protection Project
Virginia – Seaside Bays Restoration Project
Washington – Fisher Slough Marsh Restoration Project
Disclaimer: This web site was prepared by The Nature Conservancy under award [number] U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Nature Conservancy or the U.S. Department of Commerce.
