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Restoration of coastal marine habitats—often conducted under the umbrella of “nature-based solutions”—is one of the key actions underpinning global intergovernmental agreements, including the Paris Agreement and the 2021–2030 United Nations (UN) Decade of Restoration. To achieve global biodiversity and restoration targets, such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030, we need methods that accelerate and scale up restoration activities in size and impact. Part of the solution is cross-habitat facilitation—positive interactions that occur when processes generated in one habitat benefit another. These interactions involve physical, biological, and biogeochemical processes, such as wave energy dampening, competition reduction, and nutrient cycling.

Widespread loss of coastal ecosystems and the important services they provide severely threatens both biodiversity and human health across the globe (Bayraktarov et al., 2015; He and Silliman, 2019; Saunders et al., 2020). To help combat this threat, the United Nations has declared 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Demand for marine ecosystem restoration in many countries has subsequently increased at exponential rates (United Nations et al., 2020). For this demand to be met and for restoration to increase in efficiency and outcome success, the paradigm of marine restoration science, engineering, and application needs to expand to be more intellectually and socially inclusive of disciplines, sectors and stakeholders. Here, we highlight 10 key concepts that are essential for achieving such inclusivity. Widespread adoption of these concepts will advance the pace and scale of ecosystem restoration, as well as ensure higher and more equitable provisioning of user-inspired, social-ecological outcomes. For example, the restoration paradigm, with its solution-oriented focus, must rapidly factor in emerging technologies, advances in ecological and social science theory and application, diverse cultural and socioeconomic perspectives, broad stakeholder engagement, and advancements from established cultivation sciences and the private sector. Taken together, these concepts, highlight the urgent need to greatly broaden the marine restoration conceptual framework if we are to elevate and globally scale marine ecosystem restoration into an intervention that achieves real-world benefits in our lifetime.

The western rock lobster, Panulirus cygnus, provides Australia's most valuable wild caught fishery but, in recent years, there has been a dramatic decline in settlement of the post-larval phase into their natal coastal habitat. One hypothesis for this decline was that the oceanographic conditions no longer favour the survival, feeding and growth of the larval (phyllosoma) phase. To explore this, the oceanography and corresponding zooplankton prey field along five latitudinal transects in the southeastern Indian Ocean were quantified during July 2010. Leeuwin Current Water (LCW) and Sub-Tropical Surface Water (STSW) were distinguished and a prominent front at ~30°S characterized by strong eastward flow separated them. Although zooplankton abundance increased towards the north, the prey field was unevenly distributed with patches of higher prey concentration associated mainly with LCW. Chaetognaths were the most abundant prey item (means: 17.2 and 4.1 m-3 in LCW and STSW, respectively) and were positively correlated with chlorophyll a in both water masses. Panulirus cygnus phyllosoma had a highly patchy distribution but, despite lower prey concentrations, were more abundant in STSW than LCW, particularly south of the front. Our results suggest that LC meso-scale features with strong fronts may be implicated in phyllosoma aggregations and shoreward transport of late-stage larvae and that this warrants further investigation.

The Western Rocklobster (Panulirus cygnus) is the most valuable single species fishery in Australia and the largest single country spiny lobster fishery in the world. In recent years a well-known relationship between oceanographic conditions and lobster recruitment has become uncoupled, with significantly lower recruitment than expected, generating interest in the factors influencing survival and development of the planktonic larval stages. The nutritional requirements and wild prey of the planktotrophic larval stage (phyllosoma) of P. cygnus were previously unknown, hampering both management and aquaculture efforts for this species. Ship-board feeding trials of wild-caught mid-late stage P. cygnus phyllosoma in the eastern Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia, were conducted in July 2010 and August-September 2011. In a series of experiments, phyllosoma were fed single and mixed species diets of relatively abundant potential prey items (chaetognaths, salps, and krill). Chaetognaths were consumed in 2-8 times higher numbers than the other prey, and the rate of consumption of chaetognaths increased with increasing concentration of prey. The highly variable lipid content of the phyllosoma, and the fatty acid profiles of the phyllosoma and chaetognaths, indicated they were from an oligotrophic oceanic food chain where food resources for macrozooplankton were likely to be constrained. Phyllosoma fed chaetognaths over 6 days showed significant changes in some fatty acids and tended to accumulate lipid, indicating an improvement in overall nutritional condition. The discovery of a preferred prey for P. cygnus will provide a basis for future oceanographic, management and aquaculture research for this economically and ecologically valuable species.