Archived Workshops/References

The information presented is a project of the Coastal Training Program (CTP) at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. In September 2011, the Elkhorn Slough Coastal Training staff convened the program’s Habitat Restoration and Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) to discuss ways of furthering the mission of the CTP. The committee—made up of restoration experts from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), local Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs), and state and federal regulatory agencies, as well as restoration ecologists from the public and private sectors and monitoring experts from NGOs and scientific consortia— saw a need for guidelines that landowners, resource managers, and agency staff could use to implement habitat restoration and water quality improvement activities. It was decided to

focus on a limited set of restoration and management projects, those with broad application, regional relevance, and strong scientific support for effectiveness. A number of project types meeting these criteria were identified during the 2011meeting; during subsequent focus-group discussions the list was narrowed down to the six projects included in this manual. The TAC met again in 2012 to outline a monitoring protocol to be included in the manual in recognition of the importance of monitoring for informing adaptive management of these projects.