Community-based marine restoration to generate social license and ecological knowledge for upscaling oyster reef restoration

Community-led restoration operates at the intersection of ecological feasibility and social acceptability. In the marine realm, restoration is challenging due to gaps in ecological knowledge on how and where to restore lost ecosystems and limited public engagement that provides social license for restoration. The restoration of lost oyster reefs provides a prime example because these ecosystems have been degraded to functional extinction on many coastlines, resulting in limited knowledge on their restoration potential and generational amnesia among communities that these ecosystems ever existed. To generate an evidence-based and social license for future restoration work, we engaged high school students and coastal residents in research on where to restore lost oyster reefs in South Australia’s iconic Coffin Bay. Using a mixed methods approach, we aimed to understand (1) the motivation of high school students to participate in restoration research, (2) to quantify ecological responses t..., Study overview
This social-ecological research describes the initial phase of an ongoing program to restore native Ostrea angasi oyster reefs across South Australia through community-led restoration. In this paper, we focus on the program’s initiation in Coffin Bay, including project conceptualisation, study co-design, student engagement, ecological fieldwork, and community response. Our social analyses focus on student motivations to participate and residents’ responses to our ecological data because these provide insight into how people connect with local environments and how they perceive restoration (Fox & Cundill, 2018; Furness, 2021). Ecologically, our analyses focus on oyster recruitment dynamics and biodiversity enhancement because these provide key knowledge to inform the location and timing of restoration efforts (McAfee & Connell 2020). First, we provide a brief overview of the program’s development to date, followed by detailed methods for each phase.
This project wa..., # Community-based marine restoration to generate social license and ecological knowledge for upscaling oyster reef restoration

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.7pvmcvf72](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7pvmcvf72)

## **Description of the data and file structure**

This dataset contains the ecological and social data used in Lindsey et al., *Community-based marine restoration to revive ecology and human connections to forgotten reef*. The study tested the concept that ecological feasibility and social licence can be co-generated through community-based marine restoration research. The project was conducted in Coffin Bay, South Australia, where high school students and residents participated in the deployment and monitoring of small-scale oyster reef restoration units.

Ecological data include oyster recruitment counts, species richness, abundance, and community composition recorded from 28 shell-based restoration units deployed across eight sites (four within Marine Protected Areas and four i..., All human data included in this dataset were collected under the University of Adelaide Human Research Ethics approval H-2021-140. Participants (and, in the case of minors, their parents or guardians) provided informed consent for their de-identified responses to be used in research and made publicly available. All identifying information (names, addresses, school identifiers, and any contextual details that could reveal individual identity) were removed prior to data archiving to ensure full anonymity in accordance with ethical and legal standards