Vici Tjisse van der Heide - Engineering emergent trait-based mimics to restore coastal ecosystems shaped by habitat-forming species

Coastal 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 from habitat formers. Such traits are not expressed by an individual, but emerge at the aggregation level, causing self-facilitation to only work beyond certain minimum patch size and density thresholds. My recent work has demonstrated how biodegradable structures can allow restoration practitioners to overcome these establishment thresholds by kickstarting self-facilitation through temporary mimicry of emergent traits. Although this highlights a promising novel biomimicry-based restoration concept, mimics used thus far are relatively crude and untailored to the target species and locally prevailing conditions.

With this Vici-project, I aim to innovate coastal restoration by testing a new multidisciplinary design framework – grounded in ecology, industrial design, and engineering – for developing emergent trait mimics tailor-made to habitat-forming species and their environment and creating application-ready prototypes with this approach.

Using this framework, the research team will develop and test new prototype mimics for six coastal vegetation and reef habitat types formed by species with their own emergent traits across different environments, requiring prototype functionality to vary per model system. First, we will develop a portfolio of biodegradable or naturally erodible, structural materials for mimic construction. Second, following our framework, we will identify species and environment-specific key emergent traits and implement those to construct tailor-made degradable mimics using 3D-printing techniques. Third, we will test mimics in field-based restoration experiments to identify the best-performing prototypes. Following a design-and-test cycle, these prototypes will then be optimized for patch size, after which they will finally be tested for their general applicability and scalability. As such, this project advances a promising biomimicry concept towards the stage of species and environment-specific designs suitable for large-scale restoration.