National Scale Survey on landscape-scale restoration in marine and coastal ecosystems - November 2021 (NESP MaC 1.6, CSIRO)

This dataset consists of one data file (spreadsheet) of outcomes from a national scale survey of practitioners and researchers working in marine and coastal ecosystem restoration. For privacy reasons the data are aggregated and presented as summary data. Long form responses have been checked to ensure that respondents are not identifiable. The survey was open for response November 8th 2021 – November 29th 2021 and had 129 valid responses. 

Purpose:
The aim of this survey was to address the objectives of NESP MaC Project 1.6 A roadmap to coordinated landscape-scale coastal and marine restoration. The objective that this survey directly fed into was to engage with end-user groups, including restoration researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers, to understand the current state, limitations, opportunities, and research needs in scaling up coastal restoration and Nature-based Solutions for coastal hazard protection in Australia. 

Background:
This survey was one of six components for the overall project, which also consisted of workshops, engagement with Traditional Custodians, a compilation of case-studies, a review of data and models used in coastal engineering to estimate shoreline protection benefits, and a synthesis of the information into a Roadmap document. The findings are intended to form the basis of a conversation around transformational change in the implementation of coastal and marine restoration and Nature-based Solutions in Australia.

Methods:
The survey was co-designed with internal project stakeholders through an initial workshop. The survey structure and questions were then further refined by a smaller group of keen project stakeholders and provided back to the full group of project stakeholders for review and comment.
Two other Marine and Coastal Hub projects (1.7-Towards a consolidated and open-science framework for restoration monitoring and 1.10-A national inventory of implemented nature-based solutions to mitigate coastal hazards) are conducting surveys on marine and coastal restoration with some overlap in the target audience. Care was taken to ensure the surveys didn’t overlap in content and were complementary.
The survey design and methodology received ethics approval from the CSIRO Social and Interdisciplinary Science and Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number 139/21) in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007 (updated 2018). 
The survey was distributed through the Australian Coastal Council Association, Australian Coastal Restoration Network and the Australian Shellfish Restoration Network, a CSIRO held database of university researchers involved in marine/ coastal research, as well as publicly listed emails of Natural Resource Management groups in coastal areas and Traditional Owners invited to the Indigenous engagement workshops. The project team also distributed the survey to their own networks by email and Twitter which included local, state, and federal government, Traditional Owners and NGOs. What is NRM?
The survey was distributed 8-10 November 2021 with a reminder email sent out on 23 November 2021. The survey closed on 29 November 2021. 
The survey consisted mostly of multiple-choice questions, many with a 5-point Likert scale to rank importance or occurrence. Most questions included an option to provide further information, and the survey elicited good descriptive information from stakeholders elaborating on areas that may not have been on the researchers’ radar, for example, the difference in priorities on barriers – funding opportunities and timeline the highest priority. 

Location:
A virtual survey of people working in coastal and marine ecosystems that was disseminated nation-wide in Australia. This is inclusive of coastal and marine ecosystems such as coral reef, oyster, kelp, seagrass, mangroves, saltmarshes, beaches, dunes and estuaries. 

Limitations:
The survey had a 64% completion rate and there was a varying number of responses per question.
Responses to survey questions were not forced to encourage greater participation. 
Specific demographic questions were not included in this survey due to privacy considerations in how survey responses are captured in SurveyMonkey. For example, questions that were originally included in the draft survey on respondent’s role, and whether the respondent identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander were deleted, and only limited location data was captured because this could, in combination with responses to other questions, potentially result in respondents being identifiable. 
Only six respondents were from Aboriginal and/ or Torres Strait Islander organisations – not a large enough response to be representative or draw conclusions from.
The data are presented in a summarise form to ensure privacy. The survey was not designed to allow full factorial analysis (e.g. examination of the data by ecosystem type).

References:
Megan I. Saunders, Nathan J. Waltham, Toni Cannard, Marian Sheppard, Mibu Fischer, Alice Twomey, Melanie Bishop, Kris Boody, David Callaghan, Beth Fulton, Catherine Lovelock, Mariana Mayer Pinto, Ian M. McLeod, Taryn McPherson, Rebecca Morris, Andrew Pomeroy, Mike Ronan, Andy Steven, Stephen Swearer (2022) A roadmap for coordinated landscape-scale coastal and marine ecosystem restoration. Report to the National Environmental Science Program. Reef and Rainforest Research Centre Limited, Cairns.

Data location:
This dataset is filed in the eAtlas enduring data repository at: data\custodian\2021-2022-NESP-MaC-1\1.6_Coastal-marine-restoration-roadmap

Tags: MARINE, National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine and Coastal Hub, marine
Organization: Australian Ocean Data Network