Abstract Summary
Precipitous declines in coral reef and mangrove habitats worldwide threaten food security, livelihoods, and infrastructure for coastal societies. Is it possible to restore the ecological functionality of damaged habitats? What factors mediate the success of restoration efforts? Here I describe why meta-community theory, which conceives local biological communities as part of a network of interconnected communities, is the foundation for a promising framework in which to design coastal habitat restoration and set expectations for recovery following intervention. To do this, I will summarize what three decades of research on habitat loss in tropical marine systems globally has revealed about the properties of coral and mangrove meta-communities (e.g. species equivalence, migration rates, habitat heterogeneity) that mediate key ecological processes (e.g., magnitude and stability of species diversity, biomass, and productivity) across space and time. I will then highlight opportunities for incorporating meta-community properties into the spatial and temporal design of in situ coral and mangrove restoration, and evaluating the trajectories and magnitude of ecological change following intervention. Finally, I will discuss the potential for emerging meta-community network modelling techniques—which dynamically incorporate variation in habitat size and spacing, and species’ traits such as home range size, size-based trophic interactions, and ontogenetic migration ability to predict diversity and stability across the system—to serve as tools for restoration design and evaluation.
