Coastal Habitat Restoration Survey

Online expert elicitation survey of the membership of Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) and International Coral Reef Society (ICRS). This dataset includes responses to a series of questions exploring scientist and practitioner experience restoring particular coastal habitats (coral reefs, oyster reefs, mangroves, salt marsh, and seagrasses), as well as perceptions of the purpose of restoration, site selection practices, the types of metrics used to evaluate restoration success, and the potential challenges to successful restoration.

Methods
We conducted an online expert elicitation survey of the membership of Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) and International Coral Reef Society (ICRS), two organizations focused on coastal habitat restoration with members representing academia, government, and non-governmental organizations within the U.S and internationally. The standardized online survey was developed and pretested by the authors and hosted and administered through Qualtrics Research Suite. The survey was distributed by email to membership lists of both organizations by the organization leadership. The email invitation was sent to CERF members in January 2017 and to ICRS members in April 2017.  We received 67 responses from CERF members and 41 responses from ICRS members. Five additional respondents who belonged to both organizations were excluded from our analyses. Because we did not have access to the membership lists for either organization, we were unable to calculate a response rate. Of those who were qualified to take the survey by virtue of having some restoration experience, the completion rate was 63%.

This dataset includes responses to a series of questions exploring scientist and practitioner experience restoring particular coastal habitats (coral reefs, oyster reefs, mangroves, salt marsh, and seagrasses), as well as perceptions of the purpose of restoration, site selection practices, the types of metrics used to evaluate restoration success, and the potential challenges to successful restoration (see Appendix A for a list of survey questions). We included responses to a question regarding the perceived importance of genetic diversity for restoration success as an indicator of innovative restoration practices. For experience with individual coastal habitats, the purpose of restoration, and metrics used to evaluate restoration success, we calculated the percentage of respondents responding affirmatively to a given habitat/purpose/metric. We measured each respondent’s perceptions of the challenges to successful restoration on an ordinal Likert-type scale from 1 to 4: not a challenge (1); minor challenge (2); moderate challenge (3); major challenge (4). The importance of genetic diversity was also measured on an ordinal Likert-type scale from 1 to 5: do not know (0); not at all important (1); slightly important (2); moderately important (3); very important (4); extremely important (5). The survey also included sociodemographic questions to document gender, age, education, U.S./international, type of employer (academia, state government, federal government, non-governmental organization, other), years in restoration, and the percentage of restoration efforts that they have been involved in which have been published in the scientific literature.

We used Chi-square tests to analyze whether the proportion of each habitat restored, the purpose of restoration efforts, the metrics measured, and site selection methods differed between organizations. To analyze the data regarding challenges to successful restoration and the importance of genetic diversity overall and by habitat, we used non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis tests to determine whether the ordinal responses for each threat differed between the two organizations. We used linear models with a fixed factor of organization to test whether age, years in restoration, or the percentage of restoration efforts published differed between organizations. Finally, we tested differences in gender identity, type of employer, domestic/international, or highest degree by organization using Chi-square tests. All analyses were run in R Studio v.1.1.442 using the base packages.