Newly planted mangrove seedlings wear protective tubes to shield them from wave action. Coastal habitat restoration encompasses the range of remedies that society undertakes to repair, reinvigorate, or replace parts of the coastal environment that have been lost or injured as a result of human activities or natural events. Restoration projects as diverse as planting salt marshes and repairing coral reefs have involved ecologists and schoolchildren, lawyers and crane operators, fishermen, divers, and engineers. This emerging discipline cannot solve all the problems confronting the nation's coasts, nor can it obviate the need for stewardship, conservation and pollution control. Coastal habitat restoration can provide an effective means of redressing human impacts on the coastal environment, however, and the completion of each new restoration project improves the Nation's capability to repair the damage inflicted on the coast by a technological society.
Volunteers work to restore an urban marsh in Commencement Bay, Washington.
The term habitat restoration refers to site-specific actions designed to improve the biological productivity or functioning of a particular ecosystem or area. Habitat restoration takes a variety of forms, depending on the project's purpose, its legal context, site characteristics, and other factors. A third approach is habitat creation, the establishment of a habitat type in a location where it did not previously exist. The development of ponds to provide breeding habitat for waterfowl is an example of habitat creation common to many National Wildlife Refuges. Oil well accidents, such as this one in coastal Louisiana, are one cause of oil spills.