BIOPRIME

Ecosystems shaped by habitat-forming species provide vital services but are rapidly declining worldwide. Restoration is essential to mitigate losses, but failure prone, as ecosystem stability depends on self-facilitation generated by emergent traits. Such traits are not expressed by an individual, but emerge as habitat formers aggregate, causing self-facilitation to only work beyond certain minimum patch size and density thresholds. Our recent work shows how biodegradable structures can allow restoration practitioners to overcome these establishment thresholds by kickstarting self-facilitation through temporal mimicry of emergent traits. Although this highlights a promising novel biomimicry-based restoration concept, application remains restricted because mimics used thus far are i) untailored to the target species or ii) are unsuitable for large scale application in restoration. 

The overarching aim of this project is to create tailor-made and mass-producable structures that incorporate species-specific emergent traits by applying our recently advanced design framework with an optimized outplacement scheme to enable the large-scale restoration of wetlands shaped by habitat-forming species. 

Using this framework, the research team will develop and test new prototype mimics for important freshwater and estuarine wetland types as model system: peatlands, salt marshes, seagrasses and shellfish reefs, which are all formed by species with their own emergent traits. For each system, we will first identify species-specific key emergent traits to construct tailor-made biodegradable mimics with 3D-printing techniques and test them in field- based restoration experiments. Second, we will determine at which patch-size and for how long emergent traits need to be mimicked to overcome establishment thresholds to optimize outplacement. Third, we use these results to perform upscaling experiments to enable large-scale implementation. As such, this project advances a promising biomimicry concept towards the stage of species and environment-specific designs, which are suitable for large-scale practical restoration.