Great Lakes Shoreline Restoration: A Summary of 21 Projects Funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative

Ecosystem restoration is an increasingly common form of natural resource management. Yet, restoration efforts often lack clearly defined goals, quantifiable objectives, and monitoring programs needed to evaluate success. To assess whether such limitations are prominent in a subset of Great Lakes restoration efforts, we used practitioner questionnaires, project proposals, and reports from 21 Great Lakes shoreline restoration projects that have been funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Restoration Center to address four questions: 1) What were the restoration project’s characteristics in terms of goals, cost, size, ecological systems, and target organisms? 2) Were there clearly stated goals, quantifiable objectives, and a well-developed management plan? 3) Was ecological monitoring conducted and, if so, was a statistical analysis of data compared to a baseline for a spatial or temporal reference? 4) Was there demonstrated success through ecosystem improvements post-restoration? Practitioners generally claimed their projects had clear goals and quantifiable objectives, that monitoring had been performed, and that projects had high rates of success. However, our survey revealed substantial variation in the rigor of design, monitoring, and evaluation, and found only a few projects that had the ability to quantitatively assess success. Thus, for this subset of 21 projects, inferences about Great Lakes shoreline restoration are based largely on expert opinion rather than independent data collection and analysis. Our findings are consistent with prior reviews that have surmised that projects with clear, quantifiable goals and reliable monitoring programs represent the minority of restoration efforts.