Restoration success criteria

A decision must be made concerning which criteria to measure when designing an assessment program to evaluate the success of a restoration project. Each evaluation must be tailored to habitat type and site-specific conditions. At the same time, an, however, evaluations should share common criteria that allow a degree of comparability. The criteria should (1) enable a determination of the degree to which the restoration reestablishes the ecosystem structure and functions, disturbance regime, and abiotic services of the reference ecosystem; (2) Criteria need to be quantifiable such that the variance or uncertainty surrounding their measurement can be determined; (3) Criteria should be diagnostic in their ability to assist in the determination whether a habitat is restored; (4) Criteria also need to be responsive to any change in resource availability and/or habitat conditions; Finally, (5) Criteria should adequately identify the transitional stages that a healthy marine habitat goes through as it suffers impairment and as a system recovers from an impaired state. The general approach to evaluating the success of a restoration project is either to determine how effective the restoration attempt was in replicating the target habitat or to select from among competing restoration projects that one most likely to achieve success