Coral Reef Restoration Planning Guide for Managers (Webinar) – Full Process Overview

[00:00:03]hi everyone welcome to our webinar today on a manager's guide to coral reef restoration planning and design this webinar is co-sponsored by the resilience network noaa's coral reef conservation program and the coral restoration consortium and we're excited to have everyone join us today um my name is patrick mcgowan i'm the director of coral reef partnerships at the nature conservancy and your host for today um before we dive into the topic for today's webinar i'm gonna go through a couple of housekeeping items for how we're gonna work things um so today's webinar is being recorded it's an hour and a half long and there is going to be a question and answer period at the end of the webinar and you'll have lots of time to ask questions of the presenters there's also going to be an opportunity for question and answer through our online forum um after the webinar and we will give you instructions for that at the end and it's an interactive community where you can ask more questions if they come to you later for follow-up so there's two ways you can ask questions during this webinar um there you can type your question into that question box to the side of your toolbar um you can also raise your hand during the q a session and i can call on you and i'm mute you so you can ask your question yourself which i love to have people do so but your microphone needs to be working for you to be able to do that obviously so if you're having any technical difficulties during today's webinar please um type in the question box and we will try to help you solve those technical issues and get get it working so that you can hear what's going on and today we have several speakers joining us and so they're going to be talking about different components of the manager's guide and how it's being used in different conservation programs so our first speaker is jennifer coss she's the director of noaa's coral reef conservation program and i'm really excited to have jen here today to kick us off and talk about why this guide was needed and why we all partnered up to jointly invest in pulling it together and making it happen so jen thanks so much for joining us thank you petra and thank you for the honor of getting to kick this amazing guide off um i don't have any slides or anything so don't worry about that just wanted to take a few minutes to thank everybody who is involved in creating this guide and to provide a little perspective for why it was created i think as folks start to get into it and realize the complexity of what's in it it may prove to be a little bit overwhelming but i think that's a testament to the amount of knowledge that's been developed in the field of coral restoration and why we felt it was so important to capture all of those different elements and the various steps that we're suggesting folks take in order to plan and design coral restoration projects so um just a quick reminder of of where we've come over the past couple of decades noah's been involved in coral reef restoration for over 20 years primarily in addressing acute disturbances to reefs whether that was a ship grounding or a hurricane or something where we would go in do emergency assessment work a little bit of triage work to stabilize restructure and then go back in later to actually restore the wreath especially in cases where um there was a a settlement because of a grounding where we actually have funds to go in and do a full restoration so we've really um honed our skills based on our our understanding of coral reefs that was um developed through ship grounding responses primarily and that knowledge has only expanded in terms of then um not only the practice of stabilizing reefs with existing corals but then growing them in nurseries in in water and on land and different techniques so um then the just the field of coral conservation itself 20 years ago even 10 years ago our strategic plan was really more about providing good water quality and trying to limit over extracted uses of corals so that corals would have a good environment to grow in while we were understanding what climate change was going to do and i think we're all in agreement now that we had to add to that conservation strategy and add active interventions of restoration in order to regain some of that lost ecosystem functioning and get corals back to the point um hopefully where they're reproductive on their own and we buy them some time to figure out how best to acclimate to the new norm for ocean conditions so with that being said i'm going to kick off to um i believe liz shaver is up next and again thank everybody who was invested in in creating this document and hope that it proves as useful as as we think it is um and uh and and thanks again liz all you thanks jen so much um let me move ahead in the presentation um uh so thank you all so much for joining us for this webinar today on behalf of myself and all the authors of this guide um we're really thrilled to share it with you and to share a summary of the content that's that's in it before we really get started into the presentation we wanted to take a quick moment to get a sense of who you are as our audience um so if you could if you could answer two poll questions that we have for you the first one is asking about uh your physician in this field are you a marine resource manager restoration practitioner scientist or researcher or student or other of course we know lots of people can wear many hats but your main kind of role in coral reef conservation or restoration okay the results are in and it looks like we have a really good range and diversity of people with us today a lot of managers um a lot of scientists and researchers um as well as practitioners so that's great um and then we have one last poll question for you um we'd like you to tell us a little bit about your work that's related to restoration um are you currently working on a coral refrustration project planning to start something new but not not yet working are you just generally interested in restoration or are you realizing right now that you might be in the wrong webinar let's see if someone in the audience has a sense of humor all right it looks like the majority of people are interested generally in restoration but there's still a good number of people about 30 percent that are currently conducting frustration in 23 who are planning to do so and one funny person i hope at least who um said that they might be in the wrong webinar thanks everyone okay so um so we'd like to begin with a brief history for the reasons why we invested in developing this resource we actually started this project over two years ago and it came out of a lot of conversations we were having with managers and an understanding that um coral reef restoration as a field was just expanding all over the world so quickly and this is really fueled by the fact that people are really interested in seeing if it can be used to help mitigate reef degradation or maybe promote reef resilience and recovery and while a lot of these new projects are are popping up in all major coral reef regions in the world there is a bit of a concern because this field is still very new and in general ecological restoration in any habitat it can be very costly very intensive technically or ecologically complex especially considering a complex ecosystem like coral reefs um so we realized that we wanted to help provide more resources for the managers that we were working with to help them plan restoration projects and consider different options that they have before fully investing in it and at the same time we also realized there was um generally just a gap in this kind of resource um so along with lots of partners we worked with noaa's pearl reef conservation program and restoration center the u.s environmental protection agency us at the reef resilience network others at the the nature conservancy and many managers with the all islands committee and many other people um to put together this guide and in the end the goal of this guide is to help coral reef managers and their practitioner partners with planning how when and where restoration will be conducted as well as how it can support and complement management rather than take away from management so the guide is structured around a six-step adaptive process that at multiple times takes into consideration the impacts of future climate change by an adaptive process we mean that the guide is meant to be really flexible and iterative where you could potentially start at different steps in this planning cycle diagram you see on the slide um and and new information that you get at any one step could be used for you to go back and refine your work just continuously improving upon your plan and your restoration outcomes through time and i want to point out that the actual planning component of the guide is the first four steps that you see here in this planning cycle diagram the blue ones and the completion of these four steps culminates in the creation of a restoration action plan so what do i mean exactly when i say a restoration action plan we see this as an important component of an overall strategic plan for coral reef restoration and that can include an action plan as well as other plans like a monitoring plan operational plan or um more concrete work plans for each of those things the action plan is the component that describes the project's goals and objectives sites where restoration will occur and the types of interventions methods and activities that will be undertaken to conduct restoration and while we um describe these other components of a broader strategic plan and we largely point to other resources for instance like the monitoring plan we point to other resources that are available and in this guide we really focus on that action plan so as i mentioned the first four steps are the major steps that we use for planning and these include step one set goal and geographic focus in this step users focus on identifying medium to long-term restoration goals and the areas of interest where restoration could be conducted based on those goals in step two identify prioritize and select sites users conduct a process to identify and prioritize sites for restoration based on those goals that are specified in step one and this process can be done in either a quantitatively or a semi-quantitative way in step three identify design and select interventions users will brainstorm all possible interventions that could uh potentially use be used for their restoration goal they use basic and climate change specific questions to design those interventions and then they go through a process of evaluating those options and selecting the most appropriate ones for them and then in step four develop restoration action plan users develop smart objectives that help reach the goal they identify enlist activities and timelines required to meet those objectives and then they develop and create an action plan so how do we see people using the guide most effectively there are a few things here that we suggest the first is that we suggest this process be done for one restoration goal at a time so the first time going through you may want to pick your top priority goal and then go back through the process as needed depending on if you have other major priority goals as well we also suggest working with a core planning team that's made up of people that have a collective experience or expertise in things like local coral reef sites in your area like ecological or working conditions in those sites existing management strategies knowledge of social cultural complexities and climate change vulnerabilities in the area in each step of the guide we help users with the process of that step so we provide background information we provide a suggested process for how to work through that step and then we also provide suggestions for stakeholder engagement we also include a full worked example that's carried through each of those four planning steps to really help illustrate the process we've also included several tools and resources that can be used alongside the guide the first is the workbook the workbook provides a place where you can document the process any important information or decisions made during steps one through four that planning that planning process to get you to that action plan we really see it as um as something that you can retain as a reference document that has a record of all of the information and assumptions made during that the work that you did for planning it aligns really closely with the guide each suggested process point in the guide matches directly with the workbook so they really go hand in hand with each other and it's an appendix in the guide it's appendix 1 but it can also be downloaded directly as a word document from the noaa course website where the guide is located we also provide an action plan template with the guide this template provides a layout that you can use to build an action plan that's summarized from the work that you did in steps one through four um it's designed to be populated directly from the workbook so again all all of these things match and align with each other we see that the action plan template could also be used to help put together an executive summary or a summary that could help support a grant or a proposal and it's also located as an appendix in the guide or as a direct word document download and then finally we have two resources that accompany the guide that are excel based resources the first is a step two tutorial and complete example step two again is on site selection and this this tool pro tutorial provides a worked example that shows how to compile sort and analyze data to assist in this process um and then for step three sorry at the top i should say step three evaluation selection tool this tool helps you compile and visualize results from an evaluation process that you conduct to determine what interventions you're going to take so this tool helps you process and analyze and then visualize the results of that evaluation process and both of these are available as well as direct downloads on the noaa course website so now that we have given you a background on what the guide does um and how we suggest using it we're going to switch gears and focus on providing a description of each step um you'll note that each planning step is composed of three subsections a b and c but now i'm going to hand things over to jordan west who will be describing steps one and three and then kitty courtney will be describing steps uh two and four so welcome jordan thanks liz and hello everybody so i'll dive right into um talking a little bit about step one which is where we identify and prioritize goals identify the geographic focus of each goal and then select uh the goal and geographic focus that you're going to tackle first for the rest of your planning exercise next slide so the first step is to identify and prioritize a set of goals this is intended now to help uh you develop some realistic and achievable vision for the restoration work and avoid sort of a trial and error approach in favor of a specific goal-driven approach so a goal is a formal statement that details the desired impact you hope to achieve by conducting your intervention in this case restoration interventions goals should be thought of as being achieved over the medium to long term and are reached through a series a stepwise series of objectives that occur over shorter time intervals so in the guide we tackle the goals here in step one and then after some additional planning steps we zero in on the objectives later in step four so next as liz mentioned there's a suggested process um for how to do this so in order to brainstorm and prioritize our restoration goals we want to envision what success of the project would look like so we've included in the guide this box 1.1 which can be used as a starting point for your exercise the goals listed here have been adapted from several different recent resources and are broken into these four main categories of ecological socioeconomic disturbance driven or climate change adaptation focused goals you can use these example goals you can add additional ones from other resources you can modify these as you see fit but we suggest you come up with around three priority goals as a starting point um for moving forward next the next thing is that um after you selected um a few goals is you need to craft them to be smart goals next slide smart goals have the attributes oops go back one smart goals have the attributes of being specific measurable achievable relevant and time bound so this table 1.1 from the guide provide the description of each of these attributes and some examples of what they look like what we're doing here is that by spending time to make sure that your goals are as specific and detailed as possible helps not only communicate to others what you're expecting to achieve with this work but it's going to make you able to assess whether your restoration work has indeed been successful and whether your goals have been met so i'll give you an example of a smart goal in a moment so now you've got about three goals you've identified and you've made them climate smart you move to the next step which is identifying the geographic focus for each goal so here we want to ensure that the sites that we ultimately select match up well with our goals and we want to maybe identify whether there's some additional sites that we might want to think about that we hadn't otherwise thought about or start to make note of whether some areas might actually achieve multiple goals so in the guide um geographic focus refers to a broad area where conducting restoration interventions would be most appropriate or relevant to achieving the goal now if you click on the next bit we'll see a map and within these areas there will be specific sites um that you will ultimately do a selection process at that level in the next step but for now our goal is to just narrow down what could be a very large area into smaller areas that are relevant to the goal so in the green you see an example here of a smart goal that within 10 years restore diverse and structurally complex coral reef fisheries habitat so here we would be circling the areas where coral reef fisheries habitat is located that are relevant to this goal we can also do some other circling exercises looking at where the overlap is with particular problem areas for those reefs and even areas where there could be some additional social and ecological benefits from working there our suggested process is that you might want to develop a technical advisory group to help with this and this is actually recommended in general for the guide anytime you need to solicit the advice of others who have particular expertise in a topic you can convene temporary advisory groups step by step if you click on the next bit we're doing an exercise to map these geographic focus areas um and we're kind of running through two rounds of considerations what we did in that circling exercise in the previous map was the first column here functionality and benefits so we circled those areas the second round of consideration with our expert group would be to look at management and biophysical context so these bullets are you know prompts for things that you might want to think about in terms of the context of the management that's currently occurring there or if there are any particular challenges or opportunities for conducting restoration in these in these circled areas the purpose of all that is to then have a discussion and zero in on one of goal that you're going to proceed with so that's in the next slide so this is the final step part of step one where we select one priority goal and its corresponding set of focus areas to move forward with for planning and design as liz mentioned we're focusing on one goal at a time that is not to say that your other goals are not important but if you work your way through one goal completely through the process you can go back and do the process again probably much more quickly for subsequent goals since a lot of background information about sites and even interventions might be common our suggested process then in the next slide is to review steps 1a and 1b with your experts as needed and select a goal and uh restoration appropriate restoration focus areas to move forward with for the rest of the planning exercise and that then takes us forward to site selection with kitty step for the manager's guide is designed to help you identify prioritize and select sites where restoration will occur to meet your selected goal this process involves identifying potential restoration sites using a framework to prioritize those sites and in the guide we provide both a example of a quantitative and qualitative framework to do this and then finally working again with your technical advisory group and other stakeholders to select or finalize your site selection so in the first sub-step in step 2a you will identify all potential sites where restoration could be conducted to reach your goal the sites these sites of course would be within the geographic focus areas that you had already established in step one and we've defined this site as fairly broadly it's defined as an area of reef habitat that is within the geographic focus area so it's quite broad but we suggest sites should be a similar habitat type with similar depths and areas so that they can be meaningfully compared now for the suggested process for step 2a we recommend that first brainstorming your potential restoration sites and help narrow down that list we suggest that the sites because that you consider meet some of these criteria that the reef management is in effect and threats to reefs are or will be under effective management reef value is high and it performs important functions or services data are or can become available so data or information can be assessed for a site prioritization process so those are kind of your initial brainstorming guidance next uh the second process point is to develop a site list or map and you can use the same map you you used before to to identify your geographic focus areas and to then locate those potential restoration sites within those areas so moving on to step 2b you will use a framework to help prioritize which sites are high medium or low priority for restoration and you'll see on the right this site selection framework has three main components um one it has to do with relevance will it help you achieve your restoration goal is it relevant to your restoration goal will the site improve will improve conditions at the site and that corals have the potential to survive there both in the short and long term these three points are correspond to those main categories and for the coral survival part of the framework there are three sub-components one the future exposure to disturbances what is the likely frequency and severity of future disturbances to the ecological resilience of the site you know was the capacity of the site to resist or recover from these disservices and finally human impacts in terms of their types and severity that in fact that affect the site so the first task uh in in terms of suggested process for step two b is to decide how to use the framework for priorities prioritizing the site you can click on the on the next which would say that the framework can be used in a semi-quantitative or fully quantitative approach for both approaches the end result is a ranking or classification of the potential restoration sites as high medium or low priority deciding on which approach to use requires collecting available data on those sites and assessing gaps in data and determining which approach to take so going a little more into detail of each approach in the next few slides but wanted to point out again as liz mentioned earlier there is a tutorial and a work example for step two for both approaches that is available on the norris noaa chorus website so let's look at step two be using a semi-quantitative approach and here site prioritization is conducted by expert judgment this means that statements are developed for each framework part and experts rate the level of agreement with that statement using a five point scale so to do this the first suggested process is to develop the framework part statements and record average responses and just as an example in this table 2.3 under relevance to restoration goal restoring this site is extremely and directly relevant to achieving our restoration goal that's an example of a of a statement that experts can then rate as strongly agree with that statement or strongly disagree etc next we suggest that you color code the responses to facilitate a discussion of priorities and a sample color coding system is given which can help you make the results sort of more intuitive facilitate discussion about which sites kind of jump out at you of being high medium and low for restoration the second approach is a quantitative approach where site prioritization is conducted by compiling and analyzing data for each framework part for all sites being considered and again you see here these are our same framework components as before but in this part the suggested process is first to develop metrics and units to support quantitative assessment of each framework part and on the right now you can see some of these example metrics for instance in the first one uh relevance to goal proxy the metric might be proximity to areas relevant for the goal or potential to improve condition percent decline in absolute coral cover in the last five years so the guide provides instructions um in the second task of this process of quantitative approach the guide provides instructions on how to generate and normalize raw priority scores establish relative priority levels rank sites by priority and use a color scheme to show the results so in the next slide similar to what we did for the semi-quantitative you can see the qualitative approach and what it might look like and you see that it's it's similar but just a lot more information and again this example is provided in the guide and in the step two uh tutorial so the final uh part of step two uh step two c is to final a finalize site selection and you'll take the results from this process and share with your technical advisory group and other decision makers managers community leaders and stakeholders this step also allows additional perspectives and local site knowledge to be accounted for that might not have come up yet such as an important social cultural political or regulatory considerations the suggested process for this step until facilitating a discussion on site selection and we provide suggestions for how to structure a meeting and discuss the results of the framework importantly finalizing site selection refers to finalizing decisions about a list of sites with small scale projects you may find that you need to revisit this step or adapt your restoration plan with new information on what does and does not work at different sites and i think with that i'm going to turn it over to jordan thanks kitty so now with a goal and our list of sites in hand the next step is to determine what actions to take so this will involve identifying an array of intervention options and then applying design considerations including some climate considerations and then evaluating selecting the interventions next slide so the goal of step three a is to identify an array of intervention options this means brainstorming a list of all the possible options for restoration interventions that could be used to support your goal the goal here is to think really broadly and not limit ourselves in any way we'll be narrowing things down later in step 3c um so the suggested process to move forward with this if you click on the next slide is that we have provided this table 3.1 as a starting point it's adapted from several recent resources and shows a list of interventions that started as common or and or feasible this list can be used as a starting point for your brainstorming you can add additional things you can revise these you can use other resources but this will get you thinking about all of the restoration interventions in your toolbox that could possibly relate to your goal one thing that's going to be important to think about is that if you are planning to work at multiple sites you may have to do this brainstorming um for to repeat this process for any site or group of sites where interventions might be really different due to the context so you're going to lay out your full array of options and then in the next step we're going to think about how to design them considering the specifics of how your intervention option would be achieved and this includes some thinking about climate how climate change might affect the interventions um this is going to be a two-fold process that includes first thinking about general design considerations that you would think about anyway for using any intervention and then climate change specific considerations now you want to go through this process at least in a basic way for all of your options before you do any narrowing down because after all when we get to evaluating selecting we want to be really cognizant of the potential of each option based on its design to be effective the suggested process then is to first just think about basic design so figure 3.1 um is where we've kind of created this series of five questions that you see in red and then there's some prompts for each question to help you think through um what you would need to think about for your intervention such as what coral species will be used where will corals be obtained what propagation and not planning methods will be used and then if there are other types of interventions that are going to involve biological controls or physical engineering techniques there are prompts for all of those not every question will apply to every intervention and that's okay this will help you just check through so in the next table that we've created we've created basically a template that will have you record your design specifications for each of your option based on those five questions so what you're seeing in this table is in this case our goal is within 20 years restore reef structure that reduces wave energy now this table is just an excerpt so we're only showing three out of the five questions just for brevity and we're only showing three options you would do this for all the options that you've brainstormed looking across all five questions so you can see here you're just making some um what would be required for design so for your propagating and out planning of structure building corals for instance you might say we're gonna we're gonna start with focusing on two species of digitate corals that are structure building corals and you know we're going to attach them directly to the substrate once you've done this basic design phase for each of your options now we want to roll in some climate considerations so that happens on the next slide now there are two categories of climate smart uh design considerations that you need to think about the first is how will climate change and its interaction with local stressors of concern impact the resilience of your intervention effort so for instance if increased temperature and precipitation could interact with local pollution runoff and that could exacerbate bleaching or macro algae blooms those might be things you need to consider in terms of their effect on your success the second category is how will climate change affect the physical functionality of the restoration intervention like through direct impacts on structures so for example if increasingly intense storms could threaten physical destruction of either natural or artificial structures that you put out so this chart in table 3.3 is we put together to kind of again give some thought-provoking prompts so again this is just an excerpt you're only seeing two out of the five for each category of climate smart considerations we've given some prompts to help you think about again for each of your interventions what what might i need to be thinking about here so um you use this to think about adjustments that you need to make so in the next slide we see that we can then go back to that table 3.2 where we did our basic design and we can in the blue we're starting to roll in some climate smart thinking so instead of simply we're going to pick a couple species of digitate corals we might specify species a and b will be used because they've been found to be more resistant to bleaching and or are found to be more robust to wave energy likewise we might specify our adhesive to be a particular type that's been tested to be to be standing up well so the goal here is to use this information to think about how you would need to adjust either your species or your manipulation of your species or your timing or your location or your engineering design um so that you could ensure that your intervention would be successful and resilient both today but also under under changing conditions and then this step three this final bit is to prepare then a summary description of each of these options um so now instead of just uh the option is just called propagate and outplant structure building corals there would be a paragraph that would basically synthesize in a very concise away everything that you thought about for that option that would specify um the design choices and some of the climate smart thinking in um in in a in a very concise way but a way that we could now start to be getting a sense of the potential of different options to be designed to be resilient we take those summaries forward then into the next step which is evaluation and selection on the next slide so now it's time to now it's time to narrow down our list of options to a more limited combination that's more realistic so the first process point is to think about how we're going to do this we need to think about evaluation criteria and process this figure is just um showing some different categories of criteria that we need to think about so we do suggest some kind of formal consensus building process that's based on a transparent set of criteria that you figure out these are just some categories to think about in the next slide we've actually provided a table that you can use um for evaluating and rating where we've kind of um delineated some sub criteria under each of those five categories i showed you so again the t this table is only showing the first two categories effectiveness and feasibility you can see here that like all of that design thinking that we've been doing up to now is really going to be super relevant for this effectiveness criteria about technically effective at achieving the goal and being climate smart but as you know there are many other sub criteria under feasibility and other things that you need to consider in making your decisions so this table lets you list out all of your options one two three out to the total number that you have and your expert expert group can go through and and give ratings for their agreement at the um evaluation criteria being met for each of these options notice that um there's something called that you t you get an average rating for each category but there's something called rationale where each evaluator really should be putting down their thought process because at the end of this process you'll have a big table and you'll in the next step of the suggested process you will be um getting your team together and getting your group together to discuss what it really means for what combination of options are we going to select and there may be considerations such as options that depend on each other or need to be sequenced with each other or affect each other some options might even be combined into a single option together and all of that should be evaluated with the group um in order to come up with your final set of priority activities that you're going to move forward with and we have provided this excel tool that you can use to fill out that table and it will generate a visualization for you for discussion with your group and this is again available for download on the noaa course website along with the guide so once you've got your intervention selected you're ready to move on to your restoration plan so back to kitty thank you jordan so step four is the final step in the manager's guide uh and it culminates in developing a restoration action plan and for for many of you maybe this is a um an activity you've done many times before it involves defining smart objectives developing activities and an implementation time plan frame and using everything you you've figured out today to put together a plan of action in step 4a you identify performance metrics and use those to define your smart objectives here performance metrics are used to quantify the results of your interventions and help you monitor progress in order to determine it's if they have been successful objectives are like your goal statement but while goals are medium to long-term visions objectives are shorter outcomes over 1 to 10 years that can be used as benchmarks to reach your goal just like rungs in a ladder these are different benchmarks to get up to the top the first suggested process point is to identify potential performance metrics relevant to the restoration goal and interventions and we provide table 4.1 in the guide to help you identify performance metrics that could be related to your goal it describes indicators and data outcomes for different goals and you will see that we've crosswalked um the goal statements from step one that uh here on this table and you can see like an example is circled in red the second suggested process point is to craft smart objectives and this is very similar to what you did in step one with with your smart goals but these objective statements are really the focus of of being smart which is you know they are specific measurable achievable relevant and time-bound and you want these performance metrics to provide some critical details um in your in your performance in your smart objectives in step 4b with all the other information on your restoration work in hand you can now develop a list of activities and an implementation time frame that describes how you will complete the work this this uh step suggests developing a table of activities and time frames to achieve each of your objectives and you might have multiple objectives uh there are two rounds of this as well first with restoration specific activities and second with any other reef management or community engagement activities that are still needed to support the restoration project and we provide an example for a table like this based on the example goals and objectives so finally in step 4c the last section is where you compile all the information gathered throughout the process and documented in detail in your workbook and summarize it to build your restoration action plan you can use a template we provide which is aligned by step with the guide and the workbook this template as is mentioned before is it found in appendix 2 of the guide or can be downloaded as a word document importantly not all details of your planning process or that are described in your workbook need to go into this plan the action plan is meant to summarize key decisions and highlight some of the process used to making those decisions with that being said however we recommend highly recommend maintaining your workbook as a supplementary document to to carry forward that detailed thought process assumptions you've made decisions you've made along the way so with that i will turn it over to miss thanks kitty next slide um so while we've gone through the four planning steps in the guide that lead to the development of a restoration action plan there are two additional steps that are important for your work and restoration and the continuation of planning and design these include step five implement restoration and step six monitor and evaluate progress these last two steps of the guide are together as one section called moving into action and in this section uh we provide some key considerations for both steps as well as we point to really important and relevant resources for each of those topics and while these steps seem like they may be different or kind of outside of that planning process we really see that they're all related in this continual and iterative process of planning trialing and implementing evaluating and adjusting or adapting your plans as you move maybe from smaller scale pilot projects to larger full-scale restoration and that's why we've included them all here together in this planning cycle diagram one resource that we point to a lot in the manager's guide and we wanted to mention here is a new is the new coral reef restoration monitoring guide these two guides are really complementary of each other so while you can use the manager's guide to develop a restoration action plan that action plan component of an overall strategic plan you can use the monitoring guide to build your monitoring plan and this is a really great resource for identifying those performance metrics that you'll need for your objectives as well as it provides suggested methods for conducting that all of those different types of monitoring specifically for coral reef restoration so we just summarized the content in the manager's guide and the process that we suggest you can take to plan restoration projects in your location um we'd like to end with a description of what we think is the most critical component of the guide which is of course it's real world use and application from its inception managers from around the globe have been uh really critical um players in the development of this guide by reviewing and testing its content and over the past year we've as we finalized this resource managers from the u.s pacific jurisdictions have actually been piloting this process and using it to develop restoration plans in their sites so i'll share with you just a little bit about this process but then we have two of these managers who are with us today who are going to share some of their insights and lessons learned so this multi-site uh workshop was made possible through a grant from noaa's restoration center um it was um this project is really made possible through the nature conservancy's hawaii program and the reef resilience network as major partners as well as the noaa coral reef conservation program we worked with the u.s pacific jurisdictions which are hawaii guam american samoa and the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands each each of these jurisdictions had core planning teams which was made up of one team lead this is someone who is from the leading management agency as well as five to eight additional people who were part of those teams and then each team we also included a coach who is part of the manager's guide author team generally our timeline over this last year was that we worked from february through march on step one april through may on step two june through september on step three and october um through now we're still working on step four um but this is all remote work with all four jurisdictions as well and along the way we provided expert mentors were available for each step they helped to review the workbooks that go hand-in-hand with each step of the guide each of these teams worked through the step worked on their workbook and expert mentors provided feedback and comment in documents and on calls and now i'd really love for everyone to hear directly from the managers themselves and i'd love to thank georgia coward and whitney hoot for joining this webinar today to reflect on some of their experiences georgia coward is a coral reef ecologist with the department of marine and wildlife resources and american samoa and whitney hoot is the reef resilience coordinator for the bureau of statistics and plans in guam thank you guys um so much for joining us today and i have just a few questions to ask you about your experience going through this guide and going through um restoration planning in general um so my first question is um what do you think was the most useful thing about conducting a planning process um like the one in the manager's guide for restoration in your area and um maybe georgia do you want to go first on this one hi thanks liz just want to check that everyone can hear me okay um so i think the first thing um that going through this process really did for us in american samoa is that it gave us the chance to get everyone into the same room um so to speak now in 2020 but put us all in the same space to really say what is the goal of restoration here in the territory we're a little bit different to some of the other pacific jurisdictions because we're still in the very early stages of restoration here and i think actually that's worked to our advantage because i feel like we're doing this sort of in the most cohesive and effective way by using this plan to sit together and say with our team members and other stakeholders that are involved in restoration what are our goals what do we see that is achievable and realistic and how do we want to take these goals and then communicate those to community members here chiefs local leadership and also other partners that we have on ireland so i think going through the process together that way has helped us to really understand what we want from restoration and how to move forward in the best and most effective way for us um and yeah i think it's just for us identifying the way to move forward how we want to see ourselves in the next five to ten years and then also incorporating lessons learned from other places or other places that we've all worked bringing those into this plan um it's also helped us think about things like permits here on the island what do we need to do with our permitting process to get everybody um under the same regulations what are the conditions of these permits and also do we want to have an island-wide database so that we can track restoration and that also fed into more of the step three step four of our our plan so just having the opportunity to be in one space and make this as efficient and a plan that is as effective as possible i would agree with um everything uh georgia said in terms of the importance of having a goal and you know i think we were we were already doing some coral out planting we already had a coral nursery actually we had just established our second nursery when we kind of started this process but i i don't know that we were thinking as strategically as we could about what is the actual objective other than to put more live coral out onto a reef you know we knew we had certain reefs where we had lost a lot of coral cover we knew you know more or less what tax we had lost but thinking about what is the actual goal do we want to increase fish habitat do we want to increase coastal protection et cetera so that was really helpful in terms of just being strategic and thoughtful i think uh and and and jordan touched on this when she was talking but something i really liked about this process was that most of the steps they really started with this very broad brainstorming where you consider all possibilities and that was really useful for us to kind of think without limits and say if we if we had all the money and all the time that we you know the dream that that we could what what would we do and where would we do it and then kind of narrowing down based on uh what what do you know what do we think is the feasibility of this particular intervention or the feasibility of working at this site and what do we think is going to be our outcome and you know then starting to look at our limitations our time our our budget our staff power and considering really where can we get the most um bang for our buck so that was really really helpful to kind of go through that from thinking broad to kind of narrowing down and like this is what we do in an ideal world but what what can we actually do to get um to have the most benefits for our reefs and our our human communities all right thank you both that was really um insightful and interesting to hear um my second question for you both is um a little more logistical um just asking how your team worked together to go through this planning process um for instance did you need someone to kind of facilitate the group do logistics do work on workbooks how did you kind of find that your teams worked well or maybe not well to go through a process like this i can kick us off whitney so um the first thing is is that this is how you know we did it here and i have to recognize that everywhere is very different and we work with different people and and things work differently so i think that's one of my pieces of advice for people that want to undertake this process is find what works best for you guys because that's where you'll make the most valuable product at the end but for us we definitely worked by having somebody as a dedicated note taker and we actually worked directly into the workbook so during every session whether it was an in-person or a virtual session we had somebody that was directly inputting everything that we talked about notes and everything directly into the workbook and then we would go back to that once we finished the meeting two to three of us would go back through those notes and sort of format everything revise everything as best as we could and then send that back out to the team and also this wider technical group that i think jordan mentioned earlier so we had our core team and then we had a wider technical group that was filled with stakeholders community members community leaders management that had any form of stake or you know needed buy-in for restoration so they would then also be able to review each step of our workbook and provide perspective and insight to us as well having a facilitator was also really useful for us and most of the time as the local lead i acted in that role as well just to keep things moving forward and on that note i think having a local lead was really really beneficial for us particularly this year as things were completely crazy and everything kept changing having somebody where this was one of their main priorities and keeping it focused was really important for us so i was able to keep setting those deadlines to make sure that we kept sort of moving forward and didn't have to hit pause too many times i kept providing updates as well to management leadership partners and so on so that it was still in everyone's radar but i was sort of trying to push push it forward and sort of keep keep moving through so we didn't lose you know participation and interest with other team members and the wider group as well and then just to bounce off that my final point something that worked really well for us was having having those deadlines so um i know that we had a lot of help and deadlines set by tnc and so on but setting them within us locally was really good so i could sort of keep everybody on track and say this is our next deadline we've got to keep up to this and then we can move forward from that so i think keeping it sort of focused was really important for us and i think um we had very similar experiences in guam and and like american samoa we're a small territory we don't have a vast array of people to work on a project like this so when we're talking about our stakeholder experts we did have one big stakeholder meeting with about 35 people in it when we were doing site selection because we knew that that would be um controversial and um probably elicit the most the most input as opposed to when you're talking about um restoration techniques which when you get into a broader community people don't have as much knowledge about them but people definitely wanted to have a lot of input and we wanted to give them the opportunity to have that input on where are we doing restoration and i really liked the quantity we did kind of a semi-quantitative version of the quantitative framework and that really helped us i think in that stakeholder engagement process because we were able to show we've you know we've looked at all of these numbers we got input from a lot of kind of outside experts on guam outside of our six-person local team to um to say this is these are all the numbers that we've come up with based on these kind of ratings that were done by different experts so i was like georgia i was the local team lead and i also think that that was super important just to have someone kind of managing the logistics uh scheduling meetings staying on track i did the majority of kind of the workbook drafts and we also worked directly into the workbooks um i would say for the most part we followed we probably like 80 to 85 percent of the follow process we followed to the letter and there were a couple of points where we deviated just based on how we thought we could organize it best for our team and our stakeholders but i think overall we we stuck to the process we tried to stick to our deadlines there were definitely some things that got in the way we spent we put a lot of time and thought into doing this um because i i think this is one of those things where the the the process is almost if if not maybe more valuable than the product itself it's really having the opportunity to think everything out and think critically and analyze your actions i'm sure we will also reference the the uh the guide that we produce but i think that just going through this was really helpful and something else that we did and i think this probably helped us um have maybe more buy-in and a little more legitimacy is when we when we chose our team we selected you know kind of the most appropriate individuals from different agencies so we've got the bureau of citizen plans the guam environmental protection agency the university department of agriculture department of agriculture and then also our noaa liaison so we kind of have a mix of people so that they were able to pass up information and updates to their respective leadership at their agencies and i think that that was really helpful to kind of get broad broader perspectives in you know what was a relatively small team doing the majority of the work on this great thank you both um and then my last question for you is um whether you have any lessons learned that you wanted to share with others um for instance if there was anything you think made your team really successful or that you might do differently in the future if you are going to go through this process again and maybe we'll just stick with our order georgia if you wanted to go first yeah we've actually touched on a lot of the points that sort of we've learned going through the process already so i don't want to repeat myself too much and keep everybody awake um so again lessons learned i've already mentioned but having those deadlines just keeping this as a priority because these sorts of things can um be extended and drag on if you're trying to do it independently so i think having somebody that is sort of the central point and keeping deadlines and keeping the focus focused so that you work through the process and have that you know product at the end um so people see something tangible from all of these meetings um i know for us we struggle and whitney you've mentioned this as well from this concept of meeting fatigue because there's such a small work pool here of you know relevant partners and stakeholders and scientists and americans samoa so it's always that's always something that we have to overcome as a territory with any form of sort of long long process or development of a product so we're still working on that uh if anyone else has any tips on how to get through that please email me um but i think keeping everyone engaged was something that you know we've we've pushed to try and and um you know maintain throughout the whole process um i think my advice to people that want to do this um work through this process is uh a rewatch this webinar so you can see the entire format of everything and then really look through the workbook before you sit down go through the guide go through the workbook understand the process in each of those steps and know what you're working towards and then i think you can um stick to it fairly well but also uh adapt it so that it's the most effective tool for you as you know a group or an individual or a territory or so on because that's what's going to make the plan at the end the most efficient and the most valuable so that's sort of my biggest thing of advice is read through and know where you're going to make it effective yeah and i would agree with all of that again um i think that having the the small centralized team was really important i think if we'd have much more than six it would have become really hard to get everyone together to schedule meetings to keep everyone on track it's that kind of that issue of you want to engage your stakeholders and you want people to have the opportunities to give input early and often but you also want to be effective so i certainly think that's a challenge and i think that having a core team and consulting outside stakeholders either individually or with broader stakeholder meetings to provide updates and get input is a really useful part of the process and something that's kind of essential to getting things done in a timely way i i definitely recommend so we at the very beginning we came up with three restoration goals and now we have a draft action plan for one of those goals and it has i mean i i guess we started in in march maybe um so it's it's certainly um and that obviously i think that process got drawn out by by 2020 and what a year it's been but um i think that that was really good um to to really just focus on one of these goals and then move through the process i don't think i'd recommend like trying to do more than one goal at a time um and i i think that that we the goal that we picked to work through first was the one that we thought we we thought about who was on our team and who would have the most insight into that very particular goal and also generally which one we thought would be the most straightforward um since this would be the first time we were working on this process so i would when you come up anyone working on this process when you come up with these goals i would recommend putting a lot of thought into which goal you pick to move through for the first time and then considering when you look at goals two and three or four and five however many you have um whether there are other people who could um be you know who would be better experts to have on that local team um i know that and i think again that helps with meeting fatigue like are there you know are there other people who can who can help in other stages of this process particularly if they've been engaged in stakeholders in the first goal i think people it kind of helps build input interest and buy-in in later stages of the process and i think there's generally people want to be want to be engaged in this kind of thing and have some some insight into the decision making process um yeah i think that's probably mostly what what i have with lessons learned it was we've put a lot of time and energy into it and i think we did a very uh i'm proud i'm proud of what we did i think we did a really thorough job and i think um i think the if you don't do it thoroughly i don't know that there's a point in doing it thoroughly but i think it's it's i don't know there's a point in doing it because you have to really consider so many things um both from like a scientific perspective and also from you know from a management and a human community perspective um but i think i think we have a really good product and the process has been a huge learning experience in terms of figuring out what what exactly does success in restoration look like and and how can we get there all right that was um really insightful and really interesting um thank you both again so much for um just uh kind of reflecting a bit on this process and and sharing your thoughts with others and i think it's just really interesting to hear how things really touch down in these different locations um and some of your advice for others so thank you both again um and at this point we'd love to turn it over to questions thank you all for um just joining us for the webinar and we're happy to answer any questions that you have um so can i get the panelists to come back up and i have some questions that are coming through here so um first of all let's see ernesto i see you're still on you have a comment in here and i wasn't sure if it had a question to it as well would you like to um if i unmute you do you want to share your comment or is it a question i guess is my question for you but i'll start in case you want to unmute yourself and join us but uh ernesto is a colleague of ours in puerto rico and he um commented that it seems like a great tool but when proposing to restore or repair corals affected by hurricanes for example they have to cost effectively intervene at damage sites in order to seek fema funding and so kind of commenting around you know is this tool adaptive enough i guess for that or um do you can you see it being used in that kind of um situation liz i don't know if you have comments on that or any of you but ernesto if you want to type in and ask that in a different way because it wasn't exactly a question but i think there's something there interesting that you're trying to apply to your restoration i think you're thinking about um maybe that cost benefit analysis that might need to be built in to help get that kind of fema funding is that what i'm hearing yeah correct and sometimes we you know have the expectation of intervening with the best options available but maybe because of that benefit cost analysis uh we have to you know go to our lower uh alternatives yeah yeah well you know i i i know you've gone through and done a lot of this work and i'm not as familiar with how to how to do that for fema but i suspect that there is a great deal amount of information here and data compilation and analysis that would help support that kind of a cost-benefit analysis because you're really trying to be uh cognizant of what uh what you can do what your goal for achieving that in and also you know you you could say well if we didn't do this this is what's going to happen so you can kind of uh work out what the cost of inaction would be um compared to actually moving forward so i i think there's probably it doesn't have a direct relationship to what i think you're asking for but i think the information would help you get there yeah thank you thanks kitty um i'm gonna call on susan jackson um you had a question susan that we'd like to ask can unmute you susan can you hear us yeah can you hear me now yeah okay great great um i just want to thank thank you all for this overview it's been very helpful and as i mentioned in my written comment i look forward to taking a deeper dive into the document um so again you this this worked i'm intrigued the approach seems very strategic very thoughtful and just two thoughts i had that was listening um this approach seems readily adaptable for a protection of excellent and good systems so to prevent degrading as well as on broadening the framework to include a mosaic of critical habitats that support the biota that rely upon multiple habitats such as fish species that rely upon the quality and the relationship between coral systems mangroves and seagrasses and i'm just curious particularly from georgia and um and whitney has there been any consideration or thought or relevance for your work to apply this to a broader setting or to focus on prevention and protection um anybody on the panel just curious if that is come up at all um i will say i don't know that we looked at it specifically in terms of prevention but something that we did discuss a lot in site prioritization is when you're picking a site do you pick the most degraded site to restore or do you pick a site that's doing okay but could be doing better and that that was you know what what exactly is feasible to achieve and where is the best place to to really dedicate our resources and a couple of the sites we picked um as priority sites are not highly degraded sites they're sites that because of particular reasons either because of their cultural and recreational value or you know the unique coral taxa that they have we decided that they were really important for priority sites for restoration because we know that debt more degradation is is coming even if we manage all of our local stressors we're going to continue to have bleaching etc so we did decide to pick certain sites that um you know could probably maybe don't it wouldn't be seen as like the highest need for restoration if you were just looking at their level of degradation but that all really played into this um quantitative site selection process that we did mm-hmm and then you sort of discuss within yours within your panel and then with stakeholders about where you put your priorities for those that with a little bit of work maybe could be restored to a higher degree versus those that are really degraded and will take a lot of work was that part of that public discussion yeah absolutely that was a huge part of it um and something that we talked about both in our local team and then um you know it was it was one of the criteria um actually one of uh sev probably several criteria for that played into the site selection and when we did that we actually we separated um our values into we had like biological and ecological metrics that we looked at and then we had social um and economic metrics that we looked at and looking at a site um you know you may you're not necessarily going to get the highest score if a site is heavily degraded like if like water quality was a very important indicator and we weighted all of these indicators when we did our site selection so if a site has poor water quality and is degraded in that way does it even make sense to do uh restoration there if you know you're kind of setting your corals up for for failure if you put them into an inhospitable environment so that that was definitely like a really important part of our discussion with our broader stakeholder group okay thank you um i have one more question but i can hold and wait my turn again so i can go back in line thanks if you could hold on i got a couple other i'm going to try to get through and we'll see if we have time sure um thank you thanks so um this one i'm not sure who wants to answer but let's see who feels like they can they've got it um so is fisheries production a consideration or an indicator for ongoing restoration efforts if so are there examples of how productivity is being monitored and evaluated or are there examples of how managers demonstrate if productivity is or not correlated with restored corals thank you mike laymayer i'll take a first stab and then happy to have other people join us um i think that the question around fisheries production um it really depends on your goal in the end if your top goal for restoration is to restore fisheries productivity in that reef system then that would be the large part of what you are really focusing on and your interventions would play into trying to achieve that goal so for some um the restoration goal might not have anything to do with fisheries um but of course is a is a um a great benefit but maybe the the goal really is is around uh biodiversity of corals or an endangered species or even coastal protection um and that would change the way that you think about your interventions in terms of examples not and to my knowledge there's not as much in the way of examples of restoration done specifically to enhance fisheries i think there are a couple of ways you can design your interventions to achieve that goal depending on the fish species for instance if a particular species that you're looking to improve let's say a really commercially important one that kind of habitat that is important maybe when they're in their intermediate or juvenile phase you might want to look into ways that you could design your your interventions to enhance that habitat to improve that population in terms of actual examples um i don't know of many um and as well as in the scientific literature yet um but i'm happy to look into that and follow up and of course liz i mean we did use that as our example in the guide and we didn't get down to the level of specificity of species of fish so we we kind of gave some theoretical higher level examples of how you would think through that and how you would try to link fish habitat changes you know improvements to fish habitat to then later measuring whether that does result in higher productivity later so there are some examples in the guide because we use that as an example but um there would be far more you'd need to do in terms of the level of detail of that um to to get down to you know real applicability on the ground if i can just jump in really quickly this is actually something that came up when we had our very first meetings about the goals that we were going to choose and because this was an example in the workbook that you guys um sent through to us it sort of initiated this discussion that oh that's a great idea let's you know do restoration and we'll restore productivity of fisheries and everything but then we sat there and said wow that's that's a pretty big goal we ended up having a lot of discussion about um gaps in data that we had and actually that we need to address those first and um we did that for every goal as well so even for the acute disturbances we sort of we're looking through that very systematically and identifying gaps that we have that we need to fill really before we can sort of really push forward with a lot of the restoration and upscaling so i think um it's good to have those discussions at the very beginning and having stakeholders that you know might have more of a fisheries background or perspective and identifying um gaps and we ended up creating this as a goal it's not one of the goals that we worked through the entire process but we changed it to the perspective of let's restore nursery habitat for a few key reef fish species so then it got into subsistence fisheries that's really important to us here in american samoa so we sort of took some of that that sort of broader fisheries production but found a more tangible way that we're at the point where potentially we have enough information and data to sort of restore areas of nursery habitat so just a different perspective for people thank you guys um we have a hand up here from i think it's umi do you want to ask i i was actually going to get to some of your questions in the question panel but you have several so do you want to ask one of your questions if i unmute you umi are you there you've got a hand up well luckily if you can uh send my question myself to the managers or leaders yeah i was just participant in this webinar and i saw the discussion is very very uh interesting and very broad and in terms of everything about the uh the conservations and the restoration of the coral reef and i myself from fisheries departments and i saw there is a lot of things that um related to what i have done i have done some research on the corals ecosystem myself and i saw some problems same almost same problem and what happened in indonesia where my um right now my locations right now yeah all these um documents that you've discussed is very very interesting and very deep and broad and very advanced now my uh but there's a lot of in my mind it's also i wanted to ask probably to georgia and with me when we have already uh set up a planning for a program or something like that um how would you uh um a certain indicators whether uh your your plan is is um success or not or how many uh percent that you are already achieved or something like that and what are you going to do with that i mean if you just probably oh oh this objective is um not yet achieve and and will you just think um to do it later or or what are you going to do as a as a manager or as a leader in this um activities it wasn't some of my questions there are a lot of uh questions that i would like to ask you but i don't know if i uh have time for that i think and then we'll try to put the rest on our forums for you so do georgia or whitney want to try to answer that about uh indicators of success and i think i mean i i think that's a a really excellent question um i think what's part of what's really important with this process is going through and having your you know your smart objectives where things are time-bound and measurable and you're able to say you know when you have a very clear objective you can very clearly assess whether you met it and i also think you know part of this part of this process is it's designed to be integrated into adaptive management right so you can you re-evaluate the plan every couple of years every year every couple of years and you say what have we accomplished where are gaps where are we falling behind why and try to revise it so really have it as like as a living document um to kind of go back and change it as you need to so that you can be successful excellent yeah how about in samoa georgie jordan go one minute one minute great question so i think um seeing this uh plan as a living document so as whitney said you can go back and change things and realize what doesn't work and what does work it's not set in stone and the other thing is having metrics and you so for us in summer american samoa we're using this as the first few years as a pilot study to really look at what techniques work what species work and how we can measure that success and also measure failures and then we'll go back revise the plan take the lessons that we learnt and then keep moving forward and upscaling so we're at the beginning stages very much pilot studies and it's all a learning process yeah thank you thank you um yeah thank you we are out of time for our webinar today but i want to thank um all of the leads and authors on this guide this has been a huge process that everybody has invested in with a lot of goodwill and volunteering and i can't thank everybody enough for everything that you've done through your authorship of the guide and mentorship of the sites and collaboration it's truly been a great partnership and i am excited to have more people use this resource and let us know how it goes we're going to post this recording on the resilience toolkit it's gonna go out to everybody who attended please share it widely check out the forum for some of the questions we didn't get to and everybody i hope you have a great day thank you so much thank you thank you